Want to Write for the Phoenix? COM’s Got You Covered

“Our whole M.O. was to figure out what the mainstream papers were neglecting to cover — or simplifying in their coverage, or getting wrong, basically — and to do it right and to do it better.”

Investigative journalist Kristen Lombardi (COM’95) is speaking of her time at the Boston Phoenix. Maybe you pick up the Phoenix for the concert previews — or maybe you read the news section, and you know that Lombardi was onto Cardinal Bernard Law for his protection of pedophilic priests months before the Boston Globe went after the story.

Boston isn’t only a two-daily town; it also has two alternative weeklies — the Phoenix and Boston’s Weekly Dig — covering news and arts with irreverence and unabashed style. Both weeklies were cofounded by immigrants’ sons with advertising degrees from COM. And each paper has been a springboard for COM-taught journalists.

A changing world

It started small. When, in 1966, aspiring theater critic Stephen Mindich helped birth a free weekly called Boston After Dark, it was four pages. The grad student and his friends hit the campuses, delivering a paper full of club listings, reviews, and ads.

“Local daily newspapers are generally not widely read by college students,” says Mindich (CFA’65, COM’67), a first-generation Jewish Ukrainian-American from the Bronx. “And the college newspapers themselves did not do a good job of covering the broader arts and entertainment in Boston — which was a lot. So we saw a niche.”

Twice in two years, the paper doubled in size. “It became pretty successful, relatively speaking, as an arts and entertainment paper,” Mindich says. “And then, of course, the world changed.”

“From 1965 to 1967, the cultural change was enormous, and really sudden,” says Peter Simon (COM’70), singer Carly’s brother. A professional photographer published in Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone, he was then photo editor of the Boston University News, a student weekly that was rapidly becoming radical under editor Ray Mungo (CAS’67).

“Ray didn’t want pictures of plaques, poses, and tuxedos,” Simon recalls. “He wanted nitty-gritty stories of students living on the edge, protests on Marsh Plaza, Howard Zinn, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

As the Newsies graduated, some joined with like-minded souls across the river to found the Cambridge Phoenix, an arts, news, and politics weekly. Soon, Boston After Dark expanded to cover news and politics.

Across the country, a new breed of newspaper was emerging — or finally catching on, a decade after New York’s Village Voice began — youth-oriented, left-of-center rags called “alternatives.”

“The template of those papers,” reads a Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) report, “was and remains stories like those that appeared in the early days of Rolling Stone, boundary-pushing stories about things that didn’t get coverage elsewhere.”

They ditched the bloodless prose and objectivity they considered a pretense of the traditional dailies. “Our approach really is to add a point of view, to be opinionated,” says Mindich. “We have to get the facts right — that’s critical,” but “we don’t have to pretend to be unbiased, as the dailies do.”

By 1972, the Cambridge Phoenix and Boston After Dark had merged to become the Boston Phoenix, with Mindich as publisher. The move was controversial at the time, and some former Phoenix writers founded the Real Paper, which lasted the rest of the decade before folding into the Phoenix. Many writers contributed to both papers, such as music critic James Isaacs (COM’71), WBUR’s jazz expert.

A common trajectory, a thriving business

Alt weeklies began to become more professional in the ’70s, adopting “the niceties of grammar and spelling, and oh, little things like fact-checking,” says Clif Garboden (CAS’70), current managing editor of the Phoenix. And courtesy of Watergate, a new wave of bright young idealists surged into J-school. After graduating, many who later reached the big time got their first gigs in the alts. Among the COM and Phoenix alumni from this era are Fox News host Bill O’Reilly (COM’75) and Boston Globe editorial page editor Renée Loth (COM’74).

That trajectory became common. Mark Jurkowitz (COM’75), today the associate director of the PEJ, was the Phoenix’s media critic in the ’80s. In the column “Don’t Quote Me,” Jurkowitz took the local dailies to task when he felt they were lax in their duties to readers and citizens. When he became the Globe’s ombudsman, Dan Kennedy (MET’84) took over the Phoenix column.

Brett Milano (COM’82), author of The Sound of Our Town: A History of Boston Rock & Roll (Commonwealth Editions, 2007), even traveled the trajectory in reverse, reviewing shows for an evolved Globe before becoming a Phoenix columnist.

Indeed, the Phoenix had arrived as a legitimate medium and a thriving business. With a circulation of 125,000 and rising, editions were now 100-plus pages. In the late ’80s, Mindich bought a Rhode Island weekly, renaming it the Providence Phoenix. Boston radio station WFNX and a Phoenix in Portland, Maine, followed.

The paper’s first online edition appeared in 1995. Its editor today is Carly Carioli (COM’94). The site made national news in 2002 when it linked to the video of journalist Daniel Pearl’s murder by Muslim extremists. Some questioned Mindich’s decision, but the horrifying video depicted a real threat, he told the Chicago Tribune: “Frankly, America needs to understand this.”

The Phoenix also drew widespread notice when Lombardi began to expose the cover-up in the Boston archdiocese that went straight to the top.

She had learned at COM how to dig for documents and write narrative nonfiction. The Phoenix gave her the opportunity, she says, “to present a story with enough length that you could really dig into it.” And she enjoyed the freedom to make judgments. Fairness, accuracy, and an open mind are all requisites for an investigative journalist, she says, but so is a “thought process.”

“When you’re investigating something, you’re usually coming to a conclusion,” Lombardi says.

Beginning in early 2001, she pored over records, talked to victims, lawyers, priests, and psychologists, traced the career of abusive priest John Geoghan, and — in a score of articles over two years — made a compelling case that Law knew about Geoghan’s wrongdoing but continued to reassign him to different parishes.

The Globe caught on and turned up the heat on the archdiocese, bringing to bear the full weight of its resources and its Pulitzer-winning Spotlight investigative team — including Stephen Kurkjian (CAS’66), Michael Rezendes (CAS’78), and Sacha Pfeiffer (MET’94). Law stepped down in December 2002.

Lombardi went on to work for the Village Voice, winning the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ Best Investigative Reporting award last year for her story on the health crisis among 9/11 ground zero workers. She is now with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit organization devoted to investigative journalism — “another kind of alternative outlet” and financially “probably the model of the future for investigative journalism,” she says.

COM — a great resource

The Weekly Dig grew out of monthly arts zine Shovel, which was conceived in Jeff Lawrence’s brain and hatched in Tak Toyoshima’s living room. “We collated, stitched, and trimmed the first three issues by hand together,” recalls Lawrence, now Dig publisher. Toyoshima (COM’93) is the art director, as well as creator of a comic strip that recently leapt from the Dig’s pages to national daily syndication.

The son of artists from Japan, Toyoshima was born and raised on New York’s Chinatown-Soho border. At COM he focused on the creative side of advertising under Alan Holliday, then an assistant professor.

The Dig today is a 50-page humor, news, and nightlife weekly with a circulation close to 60,000. Toyoshima considers it a hybrid of “the traditional alternative newsweekly that our hippie forefathers started” and “new-school magazine” design. Local artists contribute its eye-catching covers — often simply works of art for art’s sake.

Then there are covers like the showstopper during the 2005 pennant race: a photograph of two beefy, hairy men — a Red Sox fan and a Yankees fan — passionately kissing. Equally memorable was a spoof cover nearly identical to the Phoenix’s, with the headline “FOREVER YOUNG” — not the Dig’s last poke at its elder rival. “Some day,” jokes Toyoshima, “some young whippersnappers will come along and kick us in the ass.”

Nevertheless, Dig news coverage evinces the time-honored alt disdain for “this baloney of objective journalism,” as staff writer Chris Faraone (COM’06) puts it. “There’s no such thing,” he says. “I don’t go into articles with an agenda, but I may develop one.”

Faraone started at the Dig as an intern, earning credit through COM’s State House Program, run by Fred Bayles, an associate professor of journalism. Today, Faraone’s news stories and features for the Dig are must-reads not only for their strong reporting and incisive analysis but also for their eye for detail and entertaining style. “I couldn’t even bear not to be able to curse when I deemed it appropriate,” he says.

The Queens, N.Y., native, who also grinds out freelance pieces for the Herald, recently began publishing work in Spin, The Source, and Boston magazine. “Everybody knows this is a launch pad,” Faraone says.

Lawrence concurs. “COM is a great resource for us,” he says. “These kids come out with great energy and a sense that they want to do something different.” A typical masthead lists several contributors with COM degrees, including, a few times in the past, this writer.

Like its daily counterparts, alt weeklies everywhere face challenges: Craigslist, bite-sized commuter dailies, even corporate-style consolidation. (The Voice is now part of a 16-paper conglomerate.) But relatively speaking, Boston — where Mindich’s holdings constitute the closest thing to an alt empire — looks “stubbornly anachronistic,” as the Berklee College News puts it.

After 40 years, this city, with its constant influx of new art, music, and ideas — and its rough-and-tumble politics — continues to yield rich material for the alts. His native Manhattan has Disney-fied, Toyoshima says, but “Boston still has pockets where they keep it real.”

Patrick Kennedy (COM’04) can be reached at plk@bu.edu.

Tak Toyoshima (COM’93) is the art director and cofounder of the Weekly Dig. His Secret Asian Man is the first nationally syndicated comic strip featuring an Asian-American protagonist.