The Phoenix: A 'Writer's Paper'

HIDDEN under the stacks of Old Moles, Fusions, and New York Reviews, on City newsstands, another little paper is waiting for your attention. The Phoenix, "metropolitan Boston's weekly journal of news, opinion and the arts," has been around now for a little over four months.

Managed by a group of experienced journalists, most of them in their mid-to late-20's, the paper was founded by a former Time-Life correspondent named Jeff Tarter. Tarter, who served for two years as a Vietnam reporter photographer, designed The Phoenix as a "writer's paper."

Staff reporters are not assigned specific articles. They are free to write about what interests them and in the manner they choose. "It's not good for a writer to be compelled to cover things," Tarter said. Most staff members were working for other professional publications (the New York Times, Village Voice, and Fusion ) before they came to The Phoenix. To join the paper many of them had to accept a substantial cut in salary.

Since January, The Phoenix has not been able to pay them any salary at all. Though the paper started out with what the staff thought was more than adequate financial backing, it later discovered that its backer was not going to be so generous after all. And though its financial situation is now improving, the paper's future is still not secure.

For the last two months, the paper has been coming out only once every two weeks, instead of once a week, as originally planned. But it is earning enough now to cover its current printing costs (if not much else), and its circulation and advertising revenues are increasing. Meanwhile, the staff hopes to find new, smaller backers to invest in the paper.

Despite the inability of the paper to pay them, the writers have stuck with The Phoenix, partially because they expect it to succeed. "If we thought a new infusion of money would only prolong the agony, we wouldn't keep on working," senior editor Jean Bergantini Grillo said. "There'd be no point to it."

Tarter and the rest of the staff are serious about providing "arts and entertainment" information for the paper's college age-and-older reading audience, and they print lengthy schedules of the area's film showings, exhibitions, music and theatre ("after dark, in broad daylight, all over metropolitan Boston-the area's most complete, accurate listings," the paper jokingly advertises). Instead of featuring long film reviews, it prints 15 to 20 short reviews in each issue.

Even if the paper printed long reviews of every movie showing in Boston, a reader might not decide to see a movie until weeks after the review had appeared, Tarter said. In a city where movies have long runs, it makes no sense to run a long review, unless a writer wishes to write about a movie for his own reasons, he added.

The following shows what a reader would find in The Phoenix every week that Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice was showing in Boston: "Two young married couples find that the cost of sexual and marital experimentation is higher than they had reckoned and as they beat a quick retreat from philosophical bed swapping, Hollywood also retreats from the serious moral issues at hand. Only some deft humor and several fine performances save the day:"

PROVIDING this service to its readers is only one of the paper's functions. The paper as a whole is a very serious journalistic enterprise. In its first issue, it declared that it sought to fill Boston's "journalistic vacuum" by offering an alternative to the "unimaginative reporting" typical of Boston's three daily papers. These papers, The Phoenix noted, rely heavily on wire-service copy, even for Boston-related articles, and seem to regard a reporter assigned to Somerville as a "foreign correspondent."

As a weekly paper, The Phoenix looks for stories which will cast an interesting sidelight on Boston events. For example, the paper ran an article last November on Mayor White's "other" office, where staffers conduct work on his unofficial campaign for governor. The office, made available to White without charge, is busy almost all the time, but it is unmarked and invisible to the casual observer.

White's campaign data is kept in what is called his "007 File," and this, writer Vincent B. McLelland noted, "ironically touches upon the rather pathetic fact that in this theoretically representative democracy, the early stages of any major political campaign are as remote from the public's experience as any Bond fantasy."

Like McLelland's article, most of the writing in The Phoenix combines strict reporting with analysis. Writers do not "slant" their articles according to standard ideological positions-they do seem to "take seriously their responsibility to report on the news with some detachment," as Tarter says. But they are free to express their own opinions in their articles. In this way, they give their articles more perspective, but their writing could repel readers who are not in agreement with them.

THE PAPER does not share the N.Y. Times's commitment to covering "all the news." The standard, "totalitarian" approach to news only showers a "layer of soot" on events, Tarter said. The Phoenix is not equipped to cover all the news, anyway. But it tries to make up for this with in-depth articles which point up a particular trend or provide a historical context for the news.

For instance, it printed a short article in its March on Washington issue which focused on earlier protests in the capital. "Two hundred people came to Washington from Johnson City, Tennessee." the article began. "Thirty men came by truck, from Pineville, Kentucky. The Texas delegation brought a goat named after the President.... They came [as members of the 1932 Bonus Army] to deliver a message to the President and Congress, to demand their veterans' pensions, and the President had them connections [between events] and we try to highlight those connections, make more of them." And this viewpoint affects even entertainment reviews. Rather than treating art or rock or films as something separate from "real" events, the paper tries to show what these have to do with our lives.

Reviewing Jefferson Airplane's new album Volunteers (Columbia deleted the words of Amerika ), for example, Phil Primack discussed the Airplane's relation to the traditional politics of rock, attacking those who ooh'ed and aah'ed over Woodstock as "the start of the revolution."

The original purpose of The Phoenix makes it much the same as the Village Voice. Tarter commented. "But not in a marketing sense." he quickly added. "The Village Voice makes a lot of money, but making money is not a reason to start a paper."

"We want a place where what we write won't get fucked over, a place where we have some control over what we write," Tarter said. This was the reason a group of writers got together to start the Village Voice. The same reason brought the writers on The Phoenix together.

But the results are different. For one thing, The Phoenix is "more visual," he said. The paper does feature some fine photography and has used some startling layouts, although it often falls back on rather dull designs. Some of the paper's visual problems stem from its present printing facilities. The paper is printed in a small shop, with little range in typeface. When the paper begins using IBM equipment it will have a great deal more flexibility in the use of different types.

The paper also differs from the Voice in the length of its articles. "We're committed to a good deal of short pieces." Tarter said, reflecting dispatched with tear gas and billy clubs." The article later noted the significance of the month of November for another group of demonstrators. "The Industrial Workers of the World had a motto. 'In November We Remember,' because it was in November that their best organizers always seemed to get lynched or shot or maimed."

"We don't see the world as black and white," Tarter said. "We see the that he may have been prejudiced by his experience as a reporter for Time. Most of the paper's articles do not extend to more than a page. (The paper also runs a column of "Short Takes" in each issue, little bits of news handled in a fashion similar to the "Film Clips").

WHAT is really unusual about The Phoenix is that it does convey a unified image of the world it is covering. No editor or ideology dictates what position the writers take in their articles. No single individual mind lies behind the paper, controlling the range of its coverage. Yet, one writer's work connects with another's, as if their articles revolved around a common theme.

The writers find America in its present state not to their liking, and this is evident in the paper. But they also communicate a vision of the freer, more honest society they would like to see.

While Tarter told me that one of the staff's strongest beliefs is "You shouldn't tell people what to think," the paper does seem to have a message. The message is not conveyed directly, but through the paper's whole style. The editors once admitted that, without conscious plan, their articles say "a great deal about the way this country is turning itself into a rather bleak, violent kind of place-in the name of a better world."

But despite their pessimism, they have a hope that, like the phoenix of legend which consumed itself in fire, this country, too, can rise again from its own ashes.