A Rust Belt Import

At about 10 a.m. last Friday, Nashville Scene staffers got word from associate publisher Mike Smith that Cleveland Scene—our sister paper in the Village Voice Media chain—was being bought and merged with competing alt-weekly Free Times. Two-and-a-half hours later, I announced to an anxious editorial staff that starting July 1 their new editor would be Pete Kotz, the guy who’d been at the helm of Cleveland Scene for the last eight years.

They’d already put two and two together. And it equaled Rust Belt import.

I had openly recommended Scene managing editor Matt Pulle for the job, and he was seriously considered, so criticism of this news from VVM—a chain of 16 alt-weeklies—began almost immediately, both inside and outside the newsroom.

“The best thing the Scene could do, as a local newspaper, is make the reader forget that VVM even exists,” one staffer says on condition of anonymity. “Bypassing Matt sent exactly the wrong message to the city: It said that the Scene is just another interchangeable cog in a big corporate wheel. Pete Kotz may prove to be an outstanding editor with a fresh perspective on local coverage, but I think we all miss finding out what the paper could be under Matt.”

Asked to offer his reaction, former Scene media critic Henry Walker was skeptical this newspaper would give voice to naysayers. “I doubt anything written by Liz, whose company loyalty has always been worn—or perhaps tattooed—on her attractive sleeves, will be of much use to readers wondering what will happen to the Scene under its new editor,” he writes in an email.

“The idea of an alternative weekly paper importing an editor would have been almost unthinkable just a decade ago. After all, the whole point of being an ‘alternative’ to the mainstream daily was to have the kind of grassroots feel that only a homegrown staff could provide. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. Just as Gannett led the major chains in homogenizing the daily papers, Village Voice Media…has pioneered the adoption of a cookie-cutter news and design formula and the employment of fungible editors among the alternative weeklies. Once Liz announced her departure, many of us suspected that the owners would bring in an outsider, despite strong staff sentiment to promote from within,” continues Walker.

Though Walker is considered a notorious contrarian and inveterate curmudgeon—and though former Scene editor Bruce Dobie fired him twice for ethical and factual lapses—he nevertheless maintains a certain and unwavering credibility among newspaper folk, both in Nashville and beyond, and is considered a local authority on media consolidation: “He always just kind of had his finger in the right place, even if it was a bit messy,” says Dobie. “I fired him twice, but I love him.”

But Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) executive director Richard Karpel, who acknowledges a chronic tension within the industry between chains and indies, says Walker’s commentary is wrong on at least one point. “I can tell you that on a fairly regular basis I talk to publishers who are looking for editors, and their first stop is almost always looking elsewhere for people who have done it before. It’s a pretty incestuous business.”

Karpel says that while former Scene editor Dobie and former publisher Albie Del Favero, who together founded this paper in 1989, may not have hired someone from the outside when they left the paper in 2004, it’s a well-established practice among AAN’s 132 member papers. “The difference here is this is a chain bringing someone from one of their other papers,” Karpel says. “Obviously, VVM does a lot of that, but it happens in the industry as well. I’d say 25 percent of the AAN editors now used to be somewhere else.”

Sharp-tongued VVM executive editor Michael Lacey says simply, “Walker does not know what he’s talking about. For nearly 40 years, we, like most alternative newspaper owners, have selected editors, writers and columnists based upon their skill, not their birth certificate. Walker’s simplistic comments reflect parochial jingoism. Americans move, go away to school, fall in love with the local kid, put down roots, pick up and start over.”

That’s certainly true for Kotz, who’s had his share of newspaper rodeos. Before the Minnesota native—yes, he talks like the characters in Fargo—landed in Cleveland, he was executive editor of various publishing enterprises in Des Moines, Iowa, including an alt-weekly and a business newspaper. He has also toiled in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Well regarded within VVM’s insular, hard-drinking fraternity of editors—somewhat infamously, Kotz once left a prospective staff writer stranded without a ride, as the editor was slumped over at a Texaco and too sick to drive after a night of post-interview drinking—the 47-year-old Kotz is a journalistic stylist who could be easily confused on the street for a homeless guy. Most recently, he’s perhaps best known for cleaning the Plain-Dealer’s clock after penning a story about political corruption in Cleveland that relied on information from an FBI wiretap affidavit. He faced the prospect of jail time for refusing to give up his source. But he also has an alter ego as an author, having written the book Dr. Verne’s Northern White Trash Etiquette, “the Bible of white trash living,” published by Writer’s Club Press in 2000.