Anderson Valley Advertiser:
A Great American Newspaper
by Douglas Milburn

You're zipping down Interstate 5 on a rush trip from Seattle to L.A. Though enjoying the irrigated lushness of the Sacramento Valley, you're ready for lunch and something a little different. You zoom out on the GPS, find a way off the Interstate and over the mountains toward the ocean. You get to Highway 101. Better but still a bit too much contrived Yuppie quaintness. You scan the GPS screen. Ah. You're attracted to the name "Boonville," a few miles farther west, on State Highway 128. Off you go. You find Boonville, park at a restaurant, pick up a local paper on the way in, sit, order, and start reading something called the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

An hour later, your food is cold, you've forgotten about your appointment in L.A., the waitress is giving you funny looks, and you're still reading the Anderson Valley Advertiser. You have not entered the Twilight Zone. You have instead found what is surely the best small newspaper in the United States. Maybe the world.

Let's start at the top of the front page of this weekly that sells for $1. Above Anderson Valley Advertiser we read the banner, "Beautifying Boonville." O.K.... Below the name, we find the motto:

Fanning the Flames of Discontent
Peace to the Cottages!
War on the Palaces!

Followed by two quotes:

"Be as radical as reality."
                                  --Lenin.

"Newspapers should have no friends."
                                         --Joseph Pulitzer.

Ah-ha. What have we here? We seem to have stumbled into a time-warp. Early in the new millennium, the Anderson Valley Advertiser presses on, full of hope and idealism, as if the discouraging socialist experiments of the 20th century had never happened. Or better: as if they happened and now we're the wiser, a whole lot wiser for it, more cunningly and realistically aware of how dangerous and powerful the conglomerated, vested interests of Neo-capitalism are...

The front page of this particular issue is all print--no photos--and has only four stories (each of which jumps) on upcoming elections, covering candidates and issues. You start reading and find yourself happily immersed in very well-written stuff about local people and problems.

This is a paper that CARES, about Boonville, about California, about the world. The funny thing is, the carring is contagious. Here your are reading about local candidates and issues, getting immediately involved, and rooting for the good guys.

You turn the page and find yourself looking at two full pages of thoughtful, well-crafted letters to the editor. You start reading the letters and are seduced completely. Not only does the paper care. The READERS care.

Deeper in, we come to a few syndicated columns (Alexander Cockburn, e.g.), then a half-page of local sports, then a couple of pages of local news, all with an engagé, quality-of-life slant.

In spite of the paper's name (a touch of irony, perhaps?), not much advertising. And throughout, the space-fillers are so far beyond "Today's Prayer" that you can only smile. They are carefully chosen quotes from, oh, the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Theroux, Mark Twain, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc.*

You check the masthead. I don't know Bruce Anderson (Editor and Publisher), but he's keeping the flickering flame of American journalism burning bright in Boonville, CA.

For more info:

Anderson Valley Advertiser

END

*Sample filler:
"Under a sane social system, one freed from the grip of the profit mongers, and the army of lesser parasites who now fatten on the toil of the masses, radio broadcasting could be a vast source of delight for working people, and a means of education and information. Real educators could be heard, not spellbinders, muzak purveyors, and hot-air artists."
                                                                  --John Keracher.

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