the court report, part 3

Sent: July 6, 2004 @ 9:59 p.m.

It's production day, and I'm still at the office (it's about 10 to 10).
I don't actually have anything to do, but they always seem reluctant to
send me home because random things sometimes pop up. Anyways, I've been
searching the internet, and for those of you who are interested, here
are some good articles that capture the essence of the community and my
editor, Tim Crews really well:


Ill wind in Willows

The Sacramento Valley Mirror is already skating on thin ice
financially. Can it survive a legal battle against a major media
conglomerate?

By Laura Smith

Animosity--some friendly, some not so friendly-- between rival
newspapers is nothing new, but rivalry between the scrappy,
iconoclastic Sacramento Valley Mirror and the long-established but
rather pedestrian Willows Journal has reached a boiling point.

And that’s putting it mildly.

Technically, the battle is over the Mirror’s right to publish lucrative
legal ads in Glenn County, but the war is really about its continued
ability to publish, period. And it’s a David-vs.-Goliath story, too, as
the Mirror (with a staff of mostly volunteers and a miniscule budget) is
doing battle with Morris Multimedia, a huge corporation with deep
pockets, to get the right to publish the legal ads.

For Mirror Editor-Publisher Tim Crews, it’s a fight for his paper’s
very life. For Morris Multimedia, it’s a time-consuming test of
endurance. And for the newspaper readers of Glenn County, it’s been a
heck of a show, complete with tabloid-style headlines, nasty personal
attacks and revelations about one editor’s shady past that have turned
the whole matter into a bizarre soap opera.

Relations between the Mirror and Tri-Counties Newspapers, which is
owned by Morris Multimedia, of Georgia, have never been good, to say the
least. In print and in person, Crews calls Tri-Counties 'Brand X."
Likewise, Tri-Counties' papers (the company also operates the Corning
Union, the Orland Press-Register and the Colusa Sun Herald locally) are
suspicious of Crews.

So, while the papers have never been friends, so to speak, it's
probably fair now to call them enemies, flat out.

The fighting started this spring, when Crews filed for adjudication as
a newspaper of record. The designation, given by a judge, would allow
Crews to publish legal ads, fictitious-business names and the like.
Currently, Tri-Counties owns the only adjudicated newspapers in Glenn
County, giving the company a monopoly on the advertisements' prices.
Currently, that's $75 for fictitious-business-name ads (the cost of
legals depends on their size).

Crews, who admits that financially his paper just barely scrapes by
each month, said he'd charge about half that to run fictitious-business- name ads in his paper, a boon to small, start-up businesses. Because the
advertising base in Glenn County is limited, Crews says he needs the
adjudication, and the extra income it would bring, if his paper is to
survive. The legals, he estimates, would fully double the Mirror's ad
revenue.

'For us, this is survival," he said. 'There's no way around that."

But Crews has more gumption than he has money, by a long shot. He runs
the Mirror out of a tiny Artois office that's practically hidden behind
a huge corn processing plant, drives a car that must be at least 20
years old ('Everyone makes fun of me for that," he says with a smile)
and acknowledges that his very existence is 'hand to mouth."

He has no health insurance, savings or retirement plan, and for a guy
who's looming in on 60 years old that's an increasing concern. His days
at the office usually turn into nights, but it's obvious he's proud of
his scrappy paper--and he should be.

The Mirror has broken numerous important stories that other, larger
newspapers--including his competitors--overlooked. He's won several
major awards for investigative journalism and is widely admired by his
peers in the business. Crews made national news in 1999, when he spent
several days in jail after refusing to reveal to a judge the name of the
source who told him privately that a California Highway Patrol officer
on trial for theft had stolen a gun out of police storage. The media
coverage made him a regional celebrity, for a time.

He's been successful in that regard, but his relative fame hasn't made
him rich--not even close. His longtime partner, Donna Settle, mortgaged
her house to support the paper. She lost it. The couple now lives in a
rented home with the two dogs (Barney and Kafka) they treat like
children.

So far, the fight for adjudication has cost Crews at least $9,200, and
that's with a break from his lawyer. Crews tried five years ago for
adjudication, but Tri-Counties held up the proceedings for months with
challenges to his case. Finally, he says with a sigh, he could no longer
afford to pay his lawyer to represent him, and he dropped the case.

This time, he's vowed to fight until he's adjudicated.

It's not easy, though. When asked how close the paper is to folding,
Crews visibly grits his teeth. 'Pretty close," he says frankly. 'This is
bleeding us white."

Crews knows he’s got a serious fight on his hands, but on a hot day in
early July he seems about as far away from the battle as he can get.

Sitting at his desk in his ramshackle Artois office, he's knee-deep in
a juicy story he's been following for months. The autopsy report for a
local woman in her early 30s, found dead this spring in a driveway, is
back and indicates that she died of acute methamphetamine poisoning.
Crews is disgusted that it took the county more than three months to
determine her cause of death and plans to lambaste the Coroner's Office
for the delay.

'Have someone you want to do away with?" he asks rhetorically, sitting
at his keyboard and thinking out loud. 'Bring them to Glenn County and
kill them. ... It'll be months before anyone figures out what happened,
and you'll be in Mexico by then!"

It's stories like these--important follow-ups and investigative
pieces--that the readers of Glenn County would never read anywhere else.
The Willows Journal, which is like most small-town newspapers in its mix
of soft news and respectful reportage, prides itself on its 'positive,
community-minded" stories, something Crews is suspicious of.

Newspapers, he observes, aren't supposed to be cheerleaders for the
communities they serve. They're supposed to be watchdogs for the public
interest and the first to criticize wasteful spending and abuses of
power--both of which Crews has ferreted out over and over again.

That's not to say he never runs feel-good stories. Two weeks ago, he
featured a piece praising the heroic efforts of volunteer firefighters
who, while drenched in hot motor oil, worked to pull an injured man from
his overturned car. The Mirror also routinely runs stories about lost
animals being adopted and the like.

'I just think that no matter how bad the news, [the public has] to hear
it," he says. 'I've always thought that the only way to get people to
see things as they are is to hold a mirror up for them and say ‘Look,
this is you. This is how you look. This is how things really are.'"

But doing that has made Crews few friends in Glenn County. ('I like to
say I have good friends and quality enemies," he observed recently.)
Crews has an on-and-off relationship with law enforcement there (mostly
off now, as he recently ran a front-page story criticizing the Willows
Police Department for not maintaining a complete accounting of its
officer's activities for the public). But even the people he criticizes
seem to admire Crews' guts.

'Personally, I like him a lot," said Glenn County Undersheriff Glen
Padula. 'I've asked him to stop by for coffee sometime. ... Even when he
criticizes us, I don't take it personally. It's not an adversarial role
at all."

The same goes for District Attorney Bob Holzapfel, who's been sued by
Crews.

'He's a normal guy who's out looking for the news," he said. 'He does
his job. ... What more can I say?"

A few days after Crews filed for adjudi- cation this spring, the battle
got personal.

In early May, Tri-Counties Editor Rayce Newman (who's based at the
Willows Journal office but oversees all four Tri-Counties papers) penned
a column in which he questioned, in a tangle of syntax, why "some
advertisers support a newspaper that promotes 'atheism' [his quotes] and
bashes police, sheriffs and other county offices every chance they get."

Newman went on to encourage consumers to boycott "these advertisers,"
writing, "Why would anyone who attends Church [sic] and believes in God
shop at these places? Yes, businesses have the right to advertise in any
newspaper they wish, but paying money or trade to support a product that
is full of ... well, you get the point!"

The column was a thinly veiled attack on the Mirror, which, as part of
a large and lively religion page, runs a weekly column written by Chico
atheist Larry Judkins. Newman, who started working for Tri-Counties only
recently, called the Mirror the "Valley Smear" in his column and
attacked Crews personally, calling him "Mr. Timid Snooze."

"Your 15 minutes are up, Mr. Timid Snooze!" reads a headline over his
May 10 column.

It was an ironic statement from a man who apparently has been seeking
fame for much of his adult life. Newman didn't know it, but Crews had
performed a simple Internet background check on Newman after his May 6
column was published, and it revealed more than Crews ever expected
(please see sidebar).

Newman, it turns out, has a record that dates back to 1972, when he
just 11 years old and was sent to the California Youth Authority for
theft. Later, in 1981, his career in crime led to a conviction for auto
theft and burglary; he was in prison until 1983. In 1985, he was
convicted of burglary and forgery, sent to prison and released in
November 1989. After a parole violation, he was sent back to prison in
1991, where he remained in 1992.

Just two years later, however, Newman published a book, The Hollywood
Connection: The Drug Supplier to the Stars Tells All, in which he claims
to have spent the 1980s acting in television shows like Battlestar
Galactica and Magnum PI and later working as a high-rolling cocaine
dealer to celebrity jet setters in Hollywood.

But because court records show that Newman spent much of the '80s in
prison, his claims of celebrity hobnobbing and high rolling are suspect,
at best. Crews questioned Newman's claims in a front-page story
published May 28, in which he disclosed Newman's history of petty
crimes. "No retraction--Mr. Newman: You're just a burglar," the headline
reads.

Characteristically, Newman fired back with a column (his is called
"Rayce's Ramblings") in which he's strangely self-congratulatory about
his spotty past. He claims that he's appeared on Oprah, Geraldo and
"more than 150 talk shows around the world" to lecture about drug abuse
(a claim that couldn't be verified) and calls Crews a "a jealous, bitter
old man who got kicked out of Paradise and every other paper he worked
for because he is a no talent, uneducated, self righteous idiot, who
thinks he's God's gift to journalism."

Crews was livid. Two months later, he still is.

"I like to say, he got his degree at the University of Chino," Crews
said, referring to the state prison where Newman served his sentence
out. "I mean, the guy's just incredible. I don't think he has any sense
at all."

Newman refused to be interviewed for this story, as did Dale Bean, the
publisher of Tri-Counties Newspapers, who hired him. As a result, it's
impossible to know what kind of reaction the revelations about Newman's
criminal history caused around the office. Whatever else, they must have
been a surprise. Michael Sunderman, president of Morris Multimedia's
newspaper division, confirmed that he knew nothing of Newman's history
before he was hired.

"The first time I heard his name was after he was already hired,"
Sunderman said. "We give our properties a lot of freedom with who they
hire and what they print."

Sunderman, who works out of the company's Savannah, Ga., headquarters,
said that he's "aware" of the conflict over adjudication between Tri- Counties and the Mirror.

But he denied that the media giant--which owns four network-affliated
TV stations, five daily newspapers, 24 non-daily newspapers, several
printing presses and a slew of advertising publications all over the
country--is out to crush the Mirror.

"I wouldn't say we're out to do that," Sunderman said. "We're trying to
make sure what he's doing is fair."

He declined to discuss the case in more detail. ("You're just out to
stir up mud," he said.) But, in a nutshell, Morris Newspapers'
opposition to Crews' adjudication stems from its claims that the Mirror
doesn't have enough paid subscribers to qualify and that Crews doesn't
maintain a list of those he has. Crews, however, produced a list of 927
paid subscribers (about 650 of them in-county) to a Glenn County judge
last month, his lawyer, Duffy Carolan said. That, she said, is more than
enough to qualify.

"The reason they're challenging this is to maintain a monopoly," she
said. "It's as simple as that."

Carolan insists that Crews has a strong case and predicts that when all
the dust settles he will win adjudication. He's due in court on Aug. 9
for a hearing to set a trial date, and Carolan plans to push to finish
the case up by the end of August.

For his part, Crews hopes she's successful. He knows he can't afford to
pay her much longer, and he worries about the future of his paper. When
asked what he'll do if he loses the battle and ends up closing the
paper, he raises his eyebrows and looks surprised at the question. It's
clear he hasn't really considered the possibility.

"Newspapering is my life," he says. "I think I'll die at the keyboard
or behind the camera. I love what I do, and I think it shows. I can't
imagine it any other way."



First Amendment fight

Laura Johnson
Senior Writer

The Sacramento Valley Mirror is protecting two unseen faces, and the
editor-publisher of the Glenn County newspaper, Tim Crews, could go to
jail because of them.

Crews spoke to members of Chico State University's Society of
Professional Journalists on Feb. 10 about his struggle to keep sources
confidential.

Crews was found in contempt of court on Jan. 14 after he refused to
identify two sources in a June 8, 1999, article about the alleged theft
of a semi-automatic weapon by former California Highway Patrol Officer
Dewey Anderson.

Crews petitioned his case to the state Supreme Court, which could cost
another $20,000 to $30,000, in addition to the $20,000 he has already
spent on legal fees. His appeal has been denied twice. Crews will appear
on Feb. 23 at the Tehama County Courthouse in Red Bluff if the case is
appealed, and he could face up to five days in the Glenn County jail.

"Five days in the Glenn County jail isn't that bad," Crews said. "But
if I go there, you guys are next."

SPJ will award Crews the James Madison Award in early March, which
recognizes achievements in First Amendment freedom. Crews has received
tremendous support from both local and national media in his efforts, as
well as praise from the First Amendment Coalition, Hearst Foundation,
Pulitzer and The New York Times.

"I think we're objective," Crews said. "I think we're fair, but most
of all, we stick up for the small folks."

Anderson, the former CHP officer mentioned in the article, became the
undersheriff of Glenn County in 1995 after his time spent as a CHP
officer in Tehama County. On April 28, 1999, a gun was found in the
trunk of an Anderson High School student.

And not just any student or gun.

The fiancé of Anderson's daughter was found with a CHP Mac 12 semi- automatic weapon with no serial numbers. Crews wrote the story, and
within two days he received calls from two officers who demanded
confidentiality. When Crews refused to reveal his sources, the federal
government threw the California Shield Law at him.

Anderson currently faces grand larceny charges, which could result in
18 months to 3 years in jail.

Crews told the journalists that gathered information is their property,
not anybody else's. He also had a strong opinion about the judge who
found him in contempt of court.

"He's an asshole. But free speech is free speech!" Crews said.

According to the California Shield Law, "A publisher, editor or
reporter ... shall not be adjudged in contempt by a judicial,
legislative or administrative body ... for refusing to disclose the
source of any information ..."

Crews said working for a rural community newspaper means that sources
should be protected because "they are afraid of their own shadows."

"These sources fear for their life," Crews said. "I couldn't put their
names on file."

Crews stands firm on his values to expose injustice and protect source
confidentiality, but through the ordeal, he remains the hard-working
editor of the biweekly Sacramento Valley Mirror.

"The best thing that's happened with this case is that the county
circulation took a spike," Crews said.

So how does Crews like the attention?

"Little old ladies hug me in the store," Crews said. "They say, 'We're
praying for you, Tim!' I tell them, 'Pray for Tehama County.'"




Hopefully I'll get to go home soon...
-c