Hard Copy – Frank McNally on “America’s Last Newspaper”

In a California bookshop recently, I bought a copy of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which claims (just under the masthead) to be “America’s Last Newspaper”. Happily, the slogan remains a slight exaggeration, for now.

There were still a few other titles on sale nearby, including something called the New York Times. But the claim to exclusive survivor status is poetic, because besides being a real local weekly, covering the eponymous valley, the AVA is also a sort of tribute act to newspapers of old.

Hence the “Advertiser” bit, even though it doesn’t seem to have much advertising. In the October 12th issue, ads were dwarfed by Letters to the Editor, which occupied almost three of the 12 pages and included one (about Israel) that was longer than some novellas.

Valley residents aside, the AVA attracts a modest national readership among eccentrics and those of leftish political leaning.

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Appealing to the latter, the paper also decorates its front page with rallying cries from revolutions past. One, a bit a cryptic, reads “Peace to the Cottages!”, which is borrowed from a radical German newspaper of the 1830s, and makes more sense when accompanied by the second half: “War on the Palaces!”.

Another slogan, adapted from the Industrial Workers of the World, commits the AVA to: “Fanning the flames of discontent”.

But some feisty commentary aside, the content is only mildly flammable. A front-page headline on “The Plight of Bumblebees” gets equal billing to two political stories, while a shorter and not untypical letter complains about the unrestrained growth of “pot stores” in a city called Ukiah.

Cannabis is legal in California, but the Ukiah reader thinks a maximum of five retail outlets, or one for every 3,000 people, would keep the city’s population sufficiently high.

Although the metropolis of Ukiah looms large in the AVA’s coverage, the paper is published from Boonville, a much smaller town that sounds fictional but isn’t.

With a population of 1,018, it should probably have a weekly newspaper called the Boonville Bugle. But what it does have, apparently, is an outsized reputation for countercultural activity, the AVA included. It may also have been the setting for 1990 novel Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s response to Ronald Reagan’s election as US president.

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Speaking of the plight of bumblebees, journalism in California is also notable for the quaint tradition of using “Bee” as the suffix in newspaper titles. Presumably the logic is that the papers are hard-working and productive, and perhaps that they can sting when angry.

Whatever the reason, the state has a Sacramento Bee, a Modesto Bee, and a Fresno Bee, all owned by the same company, and all still buzzing, more or less, despite the AVA’s claims.

As colourful titles go, the Bee papers do not quite match the ones lampooned by Mark Twain when he affected to be a journalist in Tennessee circa 1871.

During his brief stint as associate editor of the Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop, he was required to write op-eds savaging the rival pretensions of the Daily Hurrah, the Semi-Weekly Earthquake, the Mud Springs Morning Howl, and the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battlecry of Freedom.

Newspaper titles tend to be soberer in modern America. But there are a few funny ones left, none better than the Tombstone Epitaph, which is still just about in business in Arizona 141 years to the week after what is still the town’s most famous story.

It had been in existence for barely a year when, on October 26th, 1881, the breaking news was of a gunfight at the OK Corral. “Yesterday’s Tragedy” ran the next day’s lead headline, underselling the story until the sub-head partly rescued it: “Three men hurled into eternity in the duration of a moment”.

Perhaps in keeping with its title, the Epitaph is these days devoted to history rather than news. It also appears only monthly now.

But getting back to Bees, California does not have a monopoly on the genre. There is a also hive of small newspapers so-named in New York. And the best use of the suffix, surely, is in a small town in Arkansas called De Queen.

That’s an anglicisation of the surname of Jan De Goijen, a Dutch merchant and philanthropist, whose original the locals couldn’t pronounce. He is said to have been displeased with the corruption, but De Queen made for a perfect punchline when someone founded a weekly newspaper there in 1997 and called it the Bee.

The paper celebrated its 125th anniversary this year, still going strong. Even given the propensity of newspapers to print annoying articles, however, the definitive one insisted upon by the publishers seems gratuitously pedantic. The paper remains today, as it has always been, “The De Queen Bee,” which rather ruins the joke.