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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Die, City Pages, Die
Contributed by Anonymous on: Wednesday 22 October @ 11:50:23 |
 (NOTE: I’m writing this to the Pulse rather than my former employer, City Pages, because the current editor, Steve Perry, has a history of intercepting any letters I send and making sure that they do not run in the City Pages letters column. Fair play, balance and equal time are concepts Mr. Perry is not capable of comprehending, much less practicing—as is palpable in the kinds of stories he runs.)
This week’s [7-16-03] City Pages cover story attacks the St. Paul Pioneer Press for being owned by a large, non-local corporation.
This is the height of hypocrisy considering that City Pages was itself bought out by a large, non-local corporation a number of years ago. But hypocrisy is what City Pages is all about.
The firing of the Pioneer Press’ editorial cartoonist is held up as proof that the Pioneer Press has lost its journalistic soul and its legitimacy as a local newspaper. While I lament the decline of the political cartoon as a journalistic medium and certainly agree that consolidation, corporatization and overcommercialization are at the root of that tragic loss, it is laughable for City Pages, under editor Steve Perry of all people, to criticize the Pioneer Press when CP under Perry dumped their own editorial cartoonist eleven and a half years ago (citing “downsizing” and the exorbitant $50 a week fee they paid me as the reasons) and have been running nothing but generic syndicated comics ever since.
At the time they fired me, I was approaching my tenth anniversary as staff cartoonist, had won six consecutive Society of Professional Journalists awards for best cartoons in Minnesota (among other awards), was syndicated statewide as I produced “local content” and I was told at the time of the firing by co-publisher Kris Bartel that my cartoons at 48% readership were one of the highest rated features in the paper—which in a paper that was and is basically picked up by people who only want to look at the sex ads and music bar listings, pretty surprising.
City Pages started out in the late 1970s as a small music newspaper, became more of a newspaper in the early 1980s and by 1990, like most every “alternative” paper in America, had been reduced to a fat yuppie advertising venue pretending to be a newspaper, run by whiny, cynical Gen-X’ers like Perry, who pandered to politically correct contrarians and pumped up their salaries by firing entire staffs anytime the word “union” was breathed.
Regular Stalinist housecleanings to intimidate against union organizing began with the removal of editor Randy Anderson and company in 1982 after a meeting at his apartment explicitly calling for unionization, and continued five more times until Perry’s installment in 1989.
I survived the firings of six different editors and their regimes and witnessed the fear and cowering which resulted from the carnage every time this “progressive” tabloid got any whiff of a union on the horizon.
By the end of my decade at CP, most full time workers had been replaced by slave laborers—temp help and underpaid interns with no health insurance, no paid vacation, no benefits and no future of any kind. (But wasn’t it ever “cool” to get to say you work for City Pages! Dude!)
City Pages demolished my dream of a viable alternative press, which I had worked assiduously to help establish in the late 1970s and 1980s and argued for in my first book and articles I wrote for Alternative Media magazine out of New York.
I abandoned a promising career in the “big time” (not to mention sacrificing my acceptance to the Columbia University graduate school of journalism in 1977) to take risky, low-paying jobs as cartoonist/designer/editor with fledgling papers like the Madison (Wis.) Press Connection, MPIRG Statewatch, the Minneapolis Gay Voice, Minne HA! HA! And City Pages because I truly believed in the goal of establishing a real alternative to the mainstream corporate media. I reveled in the relative artistic freedom it initially provided to a political artist (which was completely expunged by the authoritarian dictations of Mr. Perry).
By the time I was 20 years old, I had already become the only college cartoonist ever to be published in Time magazine and the Washington Post, had won a national Society of Professional Journalists award and was syndicated to 300 papers.
From the first day I arrived in Minneapolis, my cartoons were regularly reprinted in the Minneapolis Star, which was grooming me to replace Roy Justus, who was nearing retirement. I chucked the opportunity in favor of more exciting activist journalism, political theater and organizing, and never even applied for the openings at the Minneapolis Tribune or the Pioneer Press when Long and Fearing retired, because I was so committed to the ideals of alternative media. I got away with a lot more than I would have at the dailies and don’t regret my efforts.
But at this point, City Pages deserves to die. It and papers like it, based on phony, self-serving posturing and snotty self-indulgence rather than activism, actually does more harm than good to the cause of alternative media. It is no longer in any way an alternative newspaper and hasn’t been for a long time. It is merely another corporate rag which panders to vapid bar-slogs and clawing subcultural wannabees who are so devoid of any social, cultural or political consciousness they don’t even qualify as nihilists, much less progressives.
And it has a long history of doing so in the most hypocritical way possible, on the backs of underpaid workers systematically terrorized by unwarranted surprise firings, under the thumb of an unbroken string of all-white, all-male editors-in-chief ever since its inception. At least the Pioneer Press is honest about its corporate nature, and has, unlike City Pages, had women editors…and for the present at least, unions.
--Pete Wagner
Pete Wagner was staff political cartoonist for City Pages from 1982-1992. He teaches political cartooning at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, draws caricatures as entertainment at corporate events and is a frequent guest on KMSP-FOX television’s “News Morning Nine”, where he draws political cartoons live on the air. Pete’s political cartoon website can be found at http://www.wagtoons.com
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