The City Paper is looking for a new sports editor after its young, well-heeled co-owner leveraged the start-up daily’s credibility to promote a high school football game.
Last week, City Paper sports editor Raleigh Squires was fired after a squabble with DeWitt C. Thompson V, a 29-year-old scion of a prominent Nashville family who dabbles as a part-owner of the newspaper. One of the first employees of the paper, Squires had worked at the daily since its first print run two years ago. Thompson became an owner recently when he and his father, DeWitt C. Thompson IV, the CEO of Thompson Machinery, bought an undisclosed share in The City Paper from founder and publisher Brian Brown.
Before the surprising dismissal, Squires and Thompson had tussled about the degree to which The City Paper should sponsor and promote a last-minute championship football game between the top private and public schools in the state. Titled “The City Paper Champions Bowl,” the story proposing the game enlisted virtually no support from the local prep community, and Squires felt like the paper would have lost face if it had continued to peddle the idea in his section.
“It was a farfetched idea,” Squires says. “I tried to tell them that and I tried to get them to compromise, but they wouldn’t.”
It was a week and a half ago when The City Paper launched its crusade, running a fist-pounding, back-page story announcing that it was “throwing down the gauntlet” and calling for a true state championship football game between Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA), which had already won its final game, and the winners of the public school championship games that had yet to be played. In Tennessee, there is no single state football champion. Public schools and many private schools compete separately for championships.
Brown and Thompson, a former MBA quarterback, wanted to change all that and had hoped The City Paper could get the ball rolling. Brown says that the game would have cost about $60,000—a lavish expenditure for a fledgling paper not exactly awash in advertising revenue.
Squires says that when he initially heard the idea, he supported it—until he understood that the owners wanted a Dec. 14 matchup, just three weeks away at the time. Not only were the sheer logistics almost impossible, but The City Paper was asking the participating public school teams to violate the policy of their own governing league, the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA).
“None of the teams could have played,” says Ronnie Carter, the executive director of the TSSAA, adding that nobody from The City Paper ever contacted him about the feasibility of hosting a championship game. “The state championship ends the season for everyone. That’s the rule.”
But Brown and Thompson didn’t let up. “I told them this was not a feasible idea,” says Squires, whose staff was mostly behind him. “But they said, ‘We want to float it out there anyway.’ ”
Thompson wouldn’t address comments from Squires or the circumstances surrounding the sports editor’s departure, but he defended the championship idea. “You’re not a business guy. I’m a business guy,” Thompson says. “We felt like it was a long shot, but it was a shot worth taking.”
Meanwhile, Brown says that hosting the event was consistent with his paper’s “community-minded spirit.” Besides, “We didn’t put anybody in the position to threaten their journalistic integrity.”
Squires disagrees. To placate his bosses, a reluctant Squires penned The City Paper’s Nov. 25 story promoting the game. The story never took hold. Undeterred, both Brown and Thompson wanted the paper to run a follow-up story to keep the proposal in the news, Squires says. The sports editor complied, assigning reporter Dominic Bonvissuto to the task.
Meanwhile, Thompson, who staffers say isn’t a regular presence in the newsroom, took a personal interest in the story, even standing over Bonvissuto’s shoulder as the young reporter wrote and later asking that the piece be e-mailed to him. Once Thompson received the story, he added quotes from himself before sending it back to the reporter. Thompson later asked to see a final copy of the story and decided that the piece pretty much torched the prospects of a championship football game for this year. For one, Bonvissuto quoted MBA coach Jeff Rutledge, whose triumphant team was supposed to have played in the game, as saying that his team wouldn’t be participating. The coach said that his players had already moved on to other sports and weren’t about to suit up for another football match.
So while Squires was putting the final touches on that day’s sports section, Thompson called the sports editor saying he wanted the paper to run an entirely different follow-up story that, presumably, would have kept his idea alive.
Squires wasn’t happy. He told Thompson that Bonvissuto had left the building to cover a high school wrestling match and that he personally had to attend to other stories in the paper. Squires says Thompson then offered to write the story himself. Squires steadfastly declined. The story never appeared.
Squires speculates that Thompson probably called Brown, who was in New York. The next day, the paper’s operations manager fired Squires, explaining, Squires says, that the sports editor and The City Paper “aren’t on the same page.” If there were other factors behind his dismissal, Squires says no one addressed them.
The City Paper even changed the locks on the doors and held a meeting suggesting that Squires’ dismissal had been a long time coming. Squires concedes he could be a newsroom grump and says he and editor Catherine Mayhew didn’t see eye to eye. He was demoted six months ago, with no cut in salary, from managing editor in charge of sports and production to just sports editor. But just a month before his firing, Brian Brown gave him a 10 percent raise. And he wasn’t on probation at the time of his dismissal.
Initially, Thompson and Brown neither disputed nor confirmed Squires’ version of events, saying only that the paper doesn’t comment on personnel matters. But then Brown sent this newspaper a letter claiming that Squires had written correspondence to his newspaper “threatening in nature.” Squires’ letter, which he provided to the Scene, claimed he was asked to commit a “serious breach of journalistic ethics.”
Brown’s letter to the Scene went on to say that “Mr. Squires’ obvious intention to harm The City Paper leaves us no choice but to discuss his departure, to the following extent: Any statement that Mr. Squires was discharged because he refused to commit a ‘serious breach of journalistic ethics’ is both false and defamatory.” The letter then included a veiled threat to sue the Scene: “Should such a claim be published by any person who is on notice of its false and defamatory nature, The City Paper and its owners will take such action as they deem appropriate.”
Two of Squires’ reporters eagerly defend their former boss.
“The whole situation sucks,” Bonvissuto says. “Our sports section had momentum going. To throw it all away over a personality conflict with an investor is ridiculous.”
Sportswriter Anthony Lane agrees. “It was silly to fire Raleigh. This could have been easily rectified, and it didn’t have to work out this way.”
Thompson, the CEO of PureSafety.com, an Internet startup partially bankrolled by his father, says he has no journalism experience. That, says Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., is a problem.
“This is not a new thing,” she says. “Journalistic independence is one of the key principles to having a democracy.... It’s not just independence from outside influence but from the people who own you.”
McBride says it’s easy for news organizations that violate that independence to lose credibility with the public. “If your readers think that you are operating on a value system other than just informing the public—for instance, if you’re operating to promote someone’s interest—they aren’t going to trust you and they’re not going to find what they read in your newspaper credible.”
Still, Thompson says that his plan for a true championship football game has been on his mind for a while now and that he wasn’t afraid to run with it. “It was an idea I had three years ago when I thought MBA had the best team in the state,” he says. “I felt like it was unfortunate that they didn’t have a chance to prove that.”
Thompson says The City Paper was the perfect sponsor. But what about risking the credibility of the newspaper to promote a game that had no chance of happening this year? Thompson says the risks didn’t scare him.
“I take risks every day. I have a startup company. That’s a risk. I have The City Paper and that’s a risk.”
Especially when he calls the shots.
