Don't expect hard-hitting journalism in the "new and improved" Cityview

After 25 years of weekly publication, central Iowa’s self-styled alternative paper Cityview is now a monthly targeting “higher-income demographics,” publisher Shane Goodman explained in the final weekly edition.

We know that readers want even more of our alternative style of reporting, but we also recognize that advertisers’ needs are changing. They want glossy paper stock. They want to reach higher-income demographics. They want digital editions and social media connections. And they don’t see the need to advertise on a weekly basis like they once did. With advertising as our sole source of revenue, we need to do all we can to accommodate these needs, or we won’t survive the next 25 years. As a result, this is our last weekly issue of Cityview, and you will see a new and improved monthly edition on the stands and online starting Aug. 11. It will continue to have much of the content you have come to know and love, but it will also have a number of new features and will be printed on glossy and high-bright stock paper, in a larger format, with more pages — in both print and digital formats.

I’ll be surprised to see any investigative journalism in the “new and improved” Cityview, based on the “2016 media kit” the publication is shopping around to advertisers. Gavin Aronsen posted that document in his excellent analysis of the weekly’s “sad decline.” I’ve enclosed some excerpts below, but do click through to read the whole Iowa Informer piece. Aronsen flagged some questionable articles and columns, as well as a sexist dark side to what Goodman approvingly called a “testosterone-driven approach” to news coverage. The Iowa Informer post did not mention what I consider one of Cityview’s lowest points: the editors’ disgraceful slut-shaming of former Des Moines Public Schools superintendent Nancy Sebring. Bleeding Heartland discussed that episode here.

In other central Iowa media news, KCCI-TV reporters Emmy Victor and Vanessa Peng are leaving for jobs in other states. Victor told the Des Moines Register this week that the racism she sometimes encountered while working in Iowa “did not help my decision to stay.” That should be embarrassing (but not surprising) for white Iowans. As a place to live, our state has many wonderful attributes, but we won’t make any nationwide top-10 lists for tolerance of diversity. On the contrary: Iowa has been named one of the “worst states for Black people,” and two Iowa metro areas made a list of ten cities across the country with “the worst racial inequality.”

Earlier this summer, Victor gained national attention after being charged at by a woman screaming racial abuse while on location. The reporter handled herself well during what must have been a scary event. I hope she never experiences anything like it again. I did not agree with KCCI’s decision to make a big news story out of a distraught mother’s meltdown, though. Like Damon Young, I don’t mean to excuse the woman’s behavior, but she had just watched her son get fatally shot by police near where the KCCI crew set up. Victor has not responded to my questions about whether she or KCCI pressed assault charges over that incident.

From Gavin Aronsen’s Iowa Informer post: “Cityview’s Switch to a Monthly a Sign of the Alt-Weekly’s Sad Decline.”

In his letter, Goodman claimed that under his direction, Cityview’s “unique content included the expansion of news to cover more politics, crime, music, film, theater, sports, television, technology, books, dining and nightlife.” But far from spending more time digging into corruption at city hall, the sort of investigative political reporting that’s long been a hallmark of alt-weeklies is now all but nonexistent at Cityview. Instead, most of the publication’s cover stories are fluff — often self-promotional fluff about events like the beer and martini festivals it hosts every year, or its reader surveys of the city’s sexiest people — more akin to a superficially edgier version of the substance-free lifestyle magazines like Ames Living that Goodman also publishes (and blankets central Iowa mailboxes with whether residents want them or not) than a proper alt-weekly like City Pages in Minneapolis or the Chicago Reader or, long ago, Cityview itself. When it has recently tried its hand at serious reporting, it’s failed badly, for example when an otherwise sympathetic story about the troubles transgender people face with public restrooms was accompanied by a tasteless 3D rendering of a trans woman at a urinal dressed up like a hooker with a skimpy dress only partially covering her ass on the issue’s cover.

The front page of Cityview’s media kit shows a mockup of the first monthly issue, which promotes a summer arts and entertainment guide and other articles including one about local residents who have struck it rich on TV game shows but nothing even vaguely resembling hard news coverage. An advertising calendar in the media kit (which says the August issue will feature a fall, not a summer, arts and entertainment guide) has bullet-point lists of the publication’s monthly ad features, including wedding guides in January, April, August, and October; car care guides in March and October; “patios” in June, July, and August; the swimsuit issue in July; and a party planning guide in November alongside the annual Des Moines’ Sexiest feature.

Cityview isn’t entirely devoid of political coverage, and its media kit notes this on the page featuring the 12 editorial staffers and contributing writers. Douglas Burns, who writes a regular political column, is one of them. He also publishes the Carroll Daily Times Herald, a small-town daily that, like Cityview, is independently owned but, unlike Cityview, has established itself as one of the best newspapers in the state whose reporting typically dominates its fellow small-circulation publications at the Iowa Newspaper Association’s annual awards banquet. By contrast, Cityview hasn’t been recognized by the Association for Alternative Newsmedia’s annual AltWeekly Awards program since 2002, two years before Goodman’s arrival, when it received an honorable mention for editorial layout.

Tags: Media, Race, Women

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