Off the Wall With Reader Publisher

Although the Reader is often characterized as San Diego’s “progressive” or “liberal” weekly paper, editor and publisher Jim Holman insists it represents no one viewpoint.

“Some use the word offbeat” to describe the paper, he said. “It’s not a word I would use, but I would agree with it.”

The free tabloid’s common use of strong language and off-the-wall writing styles, and its willingness to regularly tackle subjects rarely covered by the local dailies clearly place it far from the mainstream. And, like alternative-progressive-liberal weeklies in other cities, it has angered a variety of readers in its 17 years in San Diego.

However, the Reader will never fall into the traditional mold of progressive-alternative-liberal weekly tabloids simply because 42-year-old Holman, its publisher, editor and guiding force, is hardly a progressive liberal.

In many ways, Holman is a study in contrasts. He runs San Diego’s most successful weekly tabloid, yet he is described as “anti-materialistic,” and he rides the bus to work. Features in the Reader are often sexually explicit, yet Holman has instituted strict moral controls over the paper’s advertisements.

A staunch Catholic who once considered a religious vocation, Holman’s own views differ sharply from those of the pro-abortion and gay communities, two traditional bastions of progressive-alternative publications’ readership in other cities.

On April 8, Holman was among 117 people arrested during an anti-abortion demonstration outside the offices of a Hillcrest doctor. Three weeks later, he was again arrested during a protest, dragged off by San Diego policemen in front of television cameras.

“People associate it as a liberal publication, but if people knew (Holman’s) true stripes, they might be less inclined to pick up the Reader,” said Lenore Lowe, community-services director for Planned Parenthood.

Under Holman, the Reader refuses to accept advertisements promoting abortion services. It has also taken a strong stand against sexually explicit personal advertisements, another staple of some progressive weeklies.

At first, Holman--who is “opposed to the homosexual life style”--simply refused to accept ads promoting gay relationships. But, after pressure from gay activists, he broadened the ban to include all personals promoting sexual relationships.

Some of Holman’s own staffers are uncomfortable with a publisher--any publisher--taking public stands on issues.

“My personal opinion is that the less the editor or publisher becomes involved in public, high-profile issues that a paper covers the better,” longtime reporter Paul Krueger said, while emphasizing that Holman’s personal beliefs have never interfered with his own coverage. “If he becomes involved in public, it gives people who want to attack us ammunition . . . that we print or don’t print something because of a personal prejudice of the publisher.”

Since returning from a yearlong sabbatical in France at the end of 1987, soon followed by the resignation of 11-year editor Jim Mullin, Holman has assumed individual control of the paper’s editorial department, as well as the advertising. Two of the paper’s key editors, Dinah McNichols and Dennis Parker, both seen as holdovers from Mullin’s staff, have left in recent months--”forced out,” some staffers say, although both were offered writing assignments.

“When Mullin left, and I came back, he expected one of them to become my chief assistant,” Holman said. “Let’s just say it became clear to me that neither one would take his place the way he wanted.”

Holman decided the paper was in a rut while he was in France, where he studied French literature. He received copies of The Reader every two weeks.

There have been several obvious shifts in the Reader’s editorial product since Holman’s return, each intended to “create more irregularity and something unexpected in the paper,” he said.

He raised the rates paid to feature writers and implemented a series of sporadic features in the back of the first section, such as a “Crime and Incident,” verbatim excerpts from police reports, and “Liz Lang on the Town,” which is apparently an attempt to satirize society columnists.

In the traditionally newsy “City Lights” section, there are fewer cutting, hard-news stories--dubbed the “beef of the week” by staffers because they usually featured someone complaining about something--and more profile features and articles about meetings.

Many of the features focus less on news angles and more on lifestyle and slice-of-life themes, often written in free-form styles that border on the bizarre. Sentence structure and basic grammatical forms are often ignored. Perhaps more so than in the past, features are often written in first person, such as Abe Opincar’s recent trip to see a colonic administered in a “confessional,” or regular contributor Judith Moore’s recent first-person search for fleas.

Not everyone at the Reader likes the changes.

‘Pseudo-Intellectual’

“These pieces are pseudo-intellectual, with lots of arcane literary references but little substance or meaning,” regular contributor Brae Canlen said. “Just because writing is incomprehensible to the reader, doesn’t mean (the writer) is brilliant.”

Holman loves the new writers.

“I was amazed how resistant people were to change, to almost any new idea,” Holman said, as he sat in a tattered chair in his temporary office, amid newspapers strewn across carpeting with holes hastily patched with duct tape. “I think it shows how susceptible any organization is, even if it looks at itself as young and alternative. There is a certain natural conservatism.”

Dressed in gray corduroy pants, brown loafers and a striped tie tucked into an old white shirt, with his hair cropped above his ears, Holman looked more at home in the old office than he would in the Reader’s new, professional-looking India Street office.

A native of the Los Angeles area, Holman spent three years in the Navy, taught English in Colombia and worked for the Chicago Reader before starting the San Diego Reader in the bedroom of his Mission Beach home in 1972. He owns 100% of the paper, paying an annual license fee to the original Chicago Reader for use of the name.

His original plan was to work with the Reader part-time while he studied philosophy as a graduate student at UC San Diego. That plan lasted for two quarters. After starting with a press run of about 20,000, the Reader now prints 131,000 copies each week, Holman said. A few years after starting the Reader, Holman briefly explored the possibility of pursuing a “religious vocation,” leaving the paper to work with a missionary group on Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

Holman is married and has three children. He commutes to work on the bus, although he does drive a car on weekends. Once a week, he takes the train to Del Mar for a piano lesson.

“I do a lot of reading this way,” he said.

Doesn’t Own a Television

Holman’s family doesn’t own a television set, so they didn’t see him on the local news when he was arrested April 29.

“He is almost anti-materialistic,” former editor Mullin said. “He’s a spiritual man, and it’s evident in the way he leads his life.”

After Mullin joined the paper in 1976, he and Holman basically operated as co-editors, although Mullin was more directly involved with the writers and the day-to-day decisions.

Only once did Mullin feel Holman’s personal beliefs interfered with the paper’s editorial product. In 1978, Holman killed a staff-written spoof of evangelist Morris Cerullo. Holman said he simply didn’t think it was funny.

“At one point, I felt we could have changed our name to The Southern Cross (the Catholic diocese’s newspaper) and no one would have known the difference,” because of the number of church-related stories, Mullin told The Times in 1979.

“He was especially sensitive to hypocrisy when he saw it in the church,” Mullin, now editor of a paper in Miami, said recently.

Although he is an active Catholic, Holman is not a big fan of the local diocese. He recently withdrew a $2,000 pledge, after the Reader wrote about the size and style of the local bishop’s house.

A spokesman for the diocese declined to comment on he Reader or its often aggressive coverage of the diocese.

Holman’s religious convictions have helped shape the Reader’s advertising policies.

“I think most people don’t read the paper, I think that most people (only) look at a paper like ours. Very few people really read things,” Holman said. “We have to be stricter with ads than with editorial copy. And another thing, these people have lots of places to advertise, in contrast to these writers, if they have a different point of view.”

Primarily for moral reasons, Holman decided early in the paper’s history not to accept sexually explicit ads. Even ads for fashion products or gyms are closely monitored, especially the pictures. He also refuses to accept ads for people offering prepared research papers to students.

Decision on Sex Ban

“We’ve drawn lines that have very little to do with my philosophy, but they have to do with taste,” Holman said.

The decision in 1985 to ban sexually related personals--so-called matching ads--developed from Holman’s own distaste for them. The free classifieds are extremely popular with some progressive weeklies. At first, Holman only wanted to ban sexually explicit ads promoting homosexual relationships, but he broadened the ban after a meeting with members of the gay community.

“The image of the paper was becoming based on something that was very unimportant to me--the matching ads,” Holman said.

Holman is clearly uncomfortable when his own beliefs are brought into a discussion of the Reader’s policies. He originally didn’t want to be interviewed or photographed for this story. He said he learned to choose his fights carefully, after he was publicly involved in early-’80s efforts to stop construction of a San Diego convention center.

“None of us felt very comfortable with Jim’s involvement in the convention center,” Mullin said. “It made everything we wrote about the convention center suspect.”

Since then, abortion has been the one issue that Holman has been more than willing to take a stand on. He won’t accept ads offering abortion services, but he did say he would accept political ads from such groups as Womancare and Planned Parenthood.

“There are some things that are legal that I find so heinous, so horrible morally that I wouldn’t want to be an agent to it,” Holman said of abortion ads.

There is little doubt among the staffers that abortion is a special topic in Holman. Feature topics are rarely repeated, yet there have been at least two cover stories on abortion in the last year.

“He hates for the Reader to repeat itself on any topic, but it seems abortion issues have been given an exemption,” Canlen said.

The Fate of Fetuses

Story ideas “bubble up from the writers,” Holman said. “So much of the paper’s direction comes from the writers that my reluctance or my excitement to run a story has very little to do with the paper.”

But he acknowledged that the idea for last year’s controversial cover story, “What Becomes of San Diego County’s 20,000 Fetuses Each Year,” which graphically detailed the fate of aborted fetuses, was generated from his office.

“It is the one area he seems passionate about,” staff writer Neal Matthews said. “The rest of us write about what we’re passionate about all the time. At least his agenda is not hidden.”

In April, just a few days before he was arrested for the first time, the Reader ran a cover story entitled “Dutiful Daughter: On Abortion and Free Will.” Anonymously written, it told the first-person story of a young woman’s agonizing decision to have an abortion.

“We feel he’s using his paper to propagandize his own views,” said Patricia O’Neil, Womancare’s associate director. Womancare, a family-planning and abortion clinic whose members have picketed the paper in the past, is again planning a public protest of Holman’s policies.

The gay community also has been a frequent subject for the Readers editorial department, prompting some to question whether it does not single out the gay community for extra scrutiny because of Holman’s personal beliefs. Some have accused the Reader of “gay-bashing.”

“There is a niche there for us, we can tell the untold story,” Holman said. “That’s why you’ll probably see more stories on the church, abortion and gays. There are stories out there not being told by the dailies.”

The Reader writers, especially Krueger, do focus unusual attention on the scandals and embarrassments behind the scenes in the gay community, just as they focus on the scandals and embarrassing episodes within Sea World and other organizations.

“From the individuals that I deal with in the gay-lesbian community, I see the stories they do are right in line with their general approach to stories,” gay activist Rick Moore said. “I don’t sense any ill will or mean spirit.”

Bemused by Activities

Although they sometimes worry that his personal stands may lead some readers to question the paper’s reasons for covering certain stories, the paper’s writers, some of whom don’t agree with most of Holman’s more conservative viewpoints, are bemused by some of his activities.

“Many of us say, ‘Hey, that’s Holman,’ ” regular contributor Canlen said.

Staffers emphasize that Holman doesn’t interject his philosophy into their stories, nor does he generate story ideas for them on any particular subject. The idea of doing a story on Project Rescue was raised recently and quickly dismissed, Holman said, saying there probably won’t be another cover story on abortion soon.

“He’s scrupulous; he won’t be a source on a subject,” Matthews said. “I admire him for his restraint.”

The philosophy of the paper is not to promote or lionize any viewpoint, Holman said. Pointing to recent stories about pedophilia and young Ku Klux Klan member John Metzger, he noted that the articles in the Reader rarely represent points of view that he personally advocates.

The Reader is more about presenting ideas, Holman said. And, in the future, what can readers expect?

“More and more strange writing,” he said, “more eccentricity.”