By Jessica Newman
Colin Whitworth started Moon Magazine, a free Gainesville alternative monthly that focused on local politics and entertainment, with four other journalists in 1990. He graduated from UF in the late ’80s and worked at The Alligator during his college years, which he described as a “very idealistic place when it came to journalism.” After graduation, Whitworth went to work at the daily paper in Leesburg. But he wasn’t happy with his job at the profit-driven news organization, so he and some friends decided to start Moon Magazine, where Whitworth could focus on the in-depth reporting that got him into journalism in the first place.
Jessica Newman: What inspired you and your cohorts to start Moon Magazine back in 1990?
Colin Whitworth: Each of us probably had our own reason for wanting to do it. A couple of us, when we were in college, talked about starting a magazine. We actually tried to devise an idea, and we just realized, we’re in college. There’s no way we can do this. After college, I was working in mainstream journalism at a newspaper. Two of the other people were out in Seattle, Matt and Mark, working in independent journalism and as canvassers for political campaigns and issues. I was living in Leesburg. I wanted to get out of town and do something different. I went back to the idea of having my own magazine. But it was kind of like, yeah right. I’ll do journalism for 25 or 30 years, and maybe someone will make me editor of their magazine one day. And I’m talking to Matt and Mark on the phone, and they’re like, well out here they have these small magazines everywhere–in Seattle, Washington and Oregon. So they sent me the stuff in the mail, and we just started talking about it. We had a meeting down at my house in Leesburg and said, what are we going to do? Everyone had done all this research because they had all these people like yourself and myself out in Seattle. They went to them and said, how do you start a paper? Personally, my desire mostly was I liked magazine journalism. They brought the whole political kind of advocacy, left-leaning journalism thing.
JN: As you got more involved, when did you fall into the line of thinking that Moon would be the ‘anti-Gainesville Sun’? And when did you decide to forgo the mainstream model of objectivity for a philosophy of ‘fair but pointed’?
CW: When I worked at The Alligator, it was a very idealistic place when it came to journalism. People really looked at themselves as the eyes and ears of the people in a way that we all took our job very seriously and our goal was to do really good articles that really showed what was going on. Then you go out into the real world and you have all these old crusty people who are working for a paper that’s owned by a giant corporation. At the Leesburg paper, our publisher was heavily involved in influencing the news coverage, specifically the business part of the paper. I had also come to the realization that everybody has an opinion, no matter what, about anything. When you write an article, you can consciously try and edit out your viewpoint, but it affects every decision you make in preparing the story–what questions you ask, the people that you try to find to interview, the types of questions you ask to them and how you place that stuff into the story. I don’t think that you have to be objective in order to be fair. We stated from the outset in Moon that we were a left-leaning organization. Honestly, I became more political after I got fired from my temporary job at the City of Gainesville. [The city] redid the Downtown Plaza, and I wrote this thing about how I didn’t like the idea of them having to cut down all these trees. It was very beautiful. Apparently the city attorney, my boss’s boss’s boss, was friends with the people behind the renovations and saw that and through a number of steps got me fired. I wrote in another article about what went down and why they fired me. Then The Gainesville Sun did an article about it. They interviewed all the people involved. It made me look great; it made them look stupid.
JN: The stuff that you guys were writing about, this wasn’t stuff that Gainesville residents could get anywhere else, right?
Colin Whitworth and his children.
CW: Not as well. The Sun used to be a lot better, back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The Gainesville Sun got a new publisher, this guy John Fitzwater, back in the late ’80s, that radically transformed that paper. He came in and had the complete mentality of, “This is here to make money.” He squashed a lot of stuff. He really became our nemesis at the paper. The Gainesville Sun left a humongous void that people in this community were hungry for. That’s why we were successful; The Gainesville Sun made it easy on us.
JN: What about where we are today? How important are alternative media outlets like Moon in a world dominated by corporate, profit-driven media?
CW: I think it’s definitely important. I think media now has a business-down model versus an editorial-down model. What I mean by that, it used to be that the business side of a media organization existed to make sure that the newspaper could get published. It was there to serve the news interests of the paper. Now it’s flipped. Now the content is what it’s called, and that’s there to serve the larger goal of making the company profitable. I think in the long run there’s going to be a prolonged period of suffering and change in the news media but that eventually we’re all going to be getting everything through the Internet or on our phones or on some other device. I think what journalism is going to change into is hard to know. There’s a need to have reliable news-gathering organizations everywhere. We’re a bright species. I think that we’ll probably figure something out.
Tags: alternative media • Gainesville • Media (r)Evolution