Going down swinging

There was little last week to suggest that the Asheville Global Report, in print for more than eight years, would soon cease to exist in that form.

Think global, print local: From left, AGR editors Eamon Martin, Rob Livingston, Greg White and Heather Houdek lament the newspaper’s demise, but insist its spirit will live on. photos by Jonathan Welch

Inside the newspaper’s fifth-floor office in the Flatiron Building, editor Eamon Martin and three colleagues had their backs to each other, eyes trained on their respective monitors. Rob Livingston tinkered with headlines; close by, Heather Houdek pulled galley sheets from a printer for proofreading. Greg White, wearing headphones, was doing something equally absorbed but less recognizable. It wasn’t time for a postmortem, yet.

AGR was started in 1999 as an eight-page newsletter by Brendan Conley, Clare Hanrahan and Bob Brown. It carved out a niche by picking up on topics that larger media outlets tend to shy away from—ongoing genocides, environmental calamities and the less savory effects of U.S. foreign policy.

“We pretty much have a strong emphasis and focus on grassroots, activist responses to global problems,” said Martin.

Week-to-week, much of AGR‘s coverage was pulled from the international wire, but early on the paper featured a considerable amount of original reporting, including dispatches from momentary flashpoints like the Seattle WTO talks and ongoing unrest like that in Chiapas, Mexico. AGR has made hay with the Global War on Terror, a little outfit called Halliburton, the scandals at Abu Ghraib, and the ongoing failure of the Hurricane Katrina response.

Of course, under-reported items often are that way for a reason: They tend to pose a challenge, or leave readers with an uneasy feeling about the state of the world. In the pages of last week’s AGR, for example, readers can learn of the plight of the mountain tapir, a darling mammal whose habitat in Peru is imperiled due to planned mining operations. They can learn about civilian deaths from U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan and radioactive material making its way into U.S. landfills. This is not happy news.

The last load: Two AGR volunteers prepare to distribute the May 24 issue — the newspaper’s last — in the publication’s trademark little red wagon.

Indeed, in most weekly editions the Four Horsemen seem to be galloping across the AGR‘s pages, leaving a trail of mayhem and manure behind them in places like Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria and the coalfields of West Virginia. The paper’s staff has managed to bear up under all of this, Martin said, by “keeping a sense of humor.”

“It requires a certain absurdist detachment,” he said. “You get to see the obscene comedy and tragedy of it all.”

There have been prior threats of closing, but the paper managed to rebound each time through fund-raisers and donations from committed supporters. Still, 436 editions later, with a weekly circulation of 2,900 and a volunteer staff of 75, AGR, as a newspaper at least, appears to be going down for the last time. Martin cited a lapse of community support, the scarcity of federal funds for nonprofits and a recent 50 percent hike in postage rates as nails in the paper’s diminutive coffin. The paper has managed to hang on this long, Martin said, “due to the sheer will and determination of the volunteers.”

That tenacity has paid off: AGR‘s voice in the wilderness has brought it national acclaim in the form of 10 awards from Project Censored (a media-watch group endorsed by no less than Walter Cronkite) and nods from the left-leaning press, including The Nation, Mother Jones and Utne Reader.

And, Martin insists, we haven’t heard the last of AGR. Daily hits at the nonprofit’s Web site, www.agrnews.org , have risen to 3,600, and the site will soon shift from a weekly digest to a breaking-news source. AGR’s reports now air on Free Speech TV on the Dish Satellite Network, as well as on public-access TV here and in Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Boone. The media source also plans to press on with its radio broadcasts on WPVM.

“We continue to be a street-level challenge to the corporate dreck that passes as democratic discourse in the media,” Martin said. “We want people to know that the Asheville Global Report is not dead.”