David Crisp
A local businessman is organizing a campaign to get downtown businesses to drop all advertising with the Billings Gazette.
The spark was a December column by Gazette Editor Darrell Ehrlick, who described some of the least savory aspects of downtown Billings.
“Downtown has a problem and, by extension, so does Billings,” he wrote. “Would I bring my kids with me to do a little leisurely shopping? I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable as a young female wandering from store to store.”
Ed Kemmick, a longtime Gazette editor and reporter and now the proprietor of LastBestNews.com, responded with characteristic eloquence. He wrote that Mr. Ehrlick had overlooked downtown’s good qualities, plus the fairly dramatic efforts under way to refurbish the heart of the city.
“To ignore all that,” he wrote, “to emphasize all the worst aspects of the downtown right in the midst of what is the make-or-break season for downtown businesses, beggars belief.”
Sean Lynch, a music promoter and downtown businessman who recently opened the Pub Station, took a harsher stance. He organized a Facebook group called Downtown Businesses Against Advertising in the Billings Gazette, which at this writing had some 34 members. Not all of the members, including the Outpost, asked to join.
By way of introduction he wrote (with minor editing changes), “The Billings Gazette editorial board has decided to support their dying business model on the backs of downtown businesses and continues to write sensationalized stories disparaging the downtown area, just for ratings… . This group is started as a protest to the Gazette and its editorial board, and we encourage all members to transfer their ad dollars to businesses that support downtown, not tear it down.”
As for downtown, I’m a fan (advertisers, take note). The Outpost was located downtown for most of its existence and left for a while only because we couldn’t find a place we could afford that had the space and parking we needed.
I hated to leave. Downtown has its unpleasant aspects, but just about every day when I walked to the bank to make a deposit I ran into somebody I was glad to see. If I had a beer too many after work, I could always leave the car behind and walk home.
When we moved out to one of the busiest intersections on Grand Avenue, that all disappeared. Walking even a couple of blocks was a miserable undertaking, and I had a far greater chance of getting run over by a car than encountering a pedestrian I knew. Downtown, I felt that I was part of a community; on Grand Avenue, only the cars seemed at home.
Your mileage may vary. Look at it this way: If you find yourself in a strange city at dinner time and think, “Good. This is my chance to try something new and different that I could never get back home,” then you probably like downtown. If you are hungry in a strange city and think, “I wonder where Applebee’s is?” then downtown probably is not for you.
But back to the point. Advertising boycotts are a bad idea for several reasons. First, most advertisers place ads because they think advertising is good for business. So pulling ads just to punish a newspaper is at least in part counterproductive.
Second, if newspapers are going to adjust their opinions to suit advertisers, then the opinions of big advertisers will matter a lot more than the opinions of small advertisers. Boycott threats may be a nice club to have in your bag, but beware of those with bigger clubs.
Third, boycotts are a sloppy way to make a point. Lynch attacked the Gazette editorial board, but Ehrlick’s opinion was his own, not that of the board, which has done nothing, so far as I know, to incur the wrath of downtown businesses. As Kemmick pointed out, the Gazette has reported extensively over the years on efforts to revitalize downtown.
Besides, I don’t believe that Ehrlick set out to trash downtown. He was just making the simple point that—well, I’m not sure what point he was making, but that’s the thing about journalism. You write in haste and repent at leisure.
I have known Sean Lynch for a long time, and I like him. I wish he was threatening to pull advertising from the Outpost because that would mean we had some to pull. But he is using the wrong weapon here, against the wrong target.
The newspaper monopolies of old are breaking up, and good riddance. But they are being replaced by thousands of websites that not only breach the wall between editorial and advertising, but that don’t even recognize that a wall ever existed. This is not the time to be calling for an even blander brand of ad-driven journalism.
David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.
