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Trust in the press is at an all-time low, misinformation abounds, and the ecosystem for local news is shattering. None of this seems to faze the Anderson Valley Advertiser—from Mendocino County, a part of Northern California known to visitors for its ancient redwoods, marijuana cultivation, and fog—which has greeted these realities over every fence: between neighborhood news and outsider fascination, writer and commenter, and, occasionally, fact and fiction. One motto of the AVA, as it’s known, is that it’s “America’s last newspaper.” It was started in 1952 by a man named Eugene Jamison, who learned the basics of printing at the Sherman Indian Institute for Orphans and aimed to attract local ads by cultivating relationships with a broad swath. Bruce Anderson, who bought the paper in 1984, took the opposite approach. As he put it, “I unified the community, against me.”
Under Anderson’s direction, the AVA has covered trials, weather, schools, and valley people. Mark Scaramella—the managing editor, whom those in the know call The Major—said that, when he started, in 1990, Anderson told him that everyone had to have “one boring meeting that they attend”; Scaramella’s would be the fire department board meeting, which he has since reported on for so long that he’s now the unofficial historian. Scaramella also follows the county board of supervisors’ meetings—noting, for instance, that they voted to install an expensive wall of bulletproof glass, supposedly for protection, but it was only waist-high. Once, the AVA uncovered that, in order to access the public court law library, you had to ask a judge for a key. “We made a row about it, and today it’s always open and has staff helping people,” Anderson said. The AVA has also devoted major energy to following local corruption scandals, landmark environmental activism, and the many tangled sagas of the Mendocino criminal justice system. In general, Scaramella told me, “local complaints are our bread and butter.”
Alongside that reporting, the AVA has featured nonfactual fare—sometimes unlabeled as such—and material that we might call crank lit, a genre that once captivated a younger Anderson. This category includes years’ worth of opining and profane letters from a person claiming the name “Wanda Tinasky,” but who Anderson and others believed was Thomas Pynchon. (“Wanda” was, in fact, a Beat poet, Tom Hawkins, who later murdered his wife and then killed himself.) In 1988, Anderson printed a sham interview between Congressman Doug Bosco and a journalist from the Des Moines Register. (The following fabricated quote was attributed to Bosco, about his constituents: “Mostly a bunch of easily stirred-up know-nothing malcontents who couldn’t care less about anything other than their beautiful ocean and where their next joint is coming from.”) Also in the late eighties, there was an article about the local school superintendent conducting classes in masturbation. Of course, that, too, was made-up. Even so, the story had impact: Anderson bought the AVA to use it “as a weapon in my wars against the County Office of Education, and the local power structure generally,” he said, and he was ultimately responsible “for the departure of something like six county school superintendents in a row.” Lately, the AVA has run fewer satirical articles—though it prints material from a Ukiah Daily Journal writer named Tom Hine, who writes both journalism under his real name and a column as Tommy Wayne Kramer. Writing fondly of the AVA’s early days, “TWK” characterized them as “its wildest, most reckless, most eye-poppingly funny, and chockfull of libel.” An appetite remains: one commenter characterized TWK as such: “He lies about everything, tries to be funny, that’s his schtick.”
Over the years, the AVA has stirred up a mixture of bafflement, admiration, and horror. It somewhat quickly achieved cult status. Portraits of the paper and Anderson have run in the New York Times (where six articles have devoted space to the man), Editor and Publisher, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Irish Times—perhaps validating what, in Anderson’s words, were his steering hopes for the AVA: to deliver “outside attention, which Mendocino County (at least those who run it) loathes.” The paper has remained lively, absurd, well-written, and troublesome; it is recognized for pulling no punches and delighting in the throw of an achingly sharp harpoon.
Obviously, the AVA predates the term “fake news”; in any case, it has done something beyond that, mixing the real with the satirical, the deeply reported with the anecdotal. Its approach has earned the AVA credibility with an impressively devoted audience. Among them is Matt Kendall, the sheriff of Mendocino County, who logs on many nights after work and often leaves comments. “I giggle and I snicker,” he told me. “Someone will get on a soapbox and begin preaching on things that just don’t make a hill of beans. They have an ax to grind on someone in the community. It becomes a gossip column. My wife gets after me. She’ll remind me, ‘Matt, you’re going down that rabbit hole, and I know it’s fun, but it’s not your fight.’” Still, he relies on the coverage, and in particular the writing from people whose politics might not “line up with” his own. “They’re really honest, really good people,” he told me, “and I’ll read things I normally wouldn’t.”
Financially, the AVA “has never exactly prospered,” per Anderson, who is now eighty-seven. In 2024, the print edition shuttered. But it’s a bare-bones operation, run with the help of volunteer writers. There is a steady base of subscribers, some ads. Anderson sees the AVA’s longevity as a result of the “combination of candor and humor, which definitely appealed to thoughtful people who shared my assumption that while the country devolved into chaos, all our institutions carried on as if things were not only normal but likely to improve so long as we elected corporate Democrats.”
Some of the paper’s methods wouldn’t pass muster with ethical sticklers, but readers of the AVA are (at least intended to be) in the know. Mike Geniella—a former reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, who considered himself “Mr. Neutral”—was won over: after his editors there, disapproving of the AVA, assigned him a takedown, Geniella realized he loved Anderson, and that, in his view, there was something honest in his literary, provocative, sometimes satirical, always confrontational approach: “Despite the reckless disregard, he was also a truth seeker.” Now Geniella is a steady AVA contributor, reporting at length on an imbroglio involving the county district attorney and auditor-treasurer. In 2004, Bosco—the former congressman, who was originally furious about the fake interview—seemed to have mellowed during an interview with the New York Times, in which he praised Anderson’s writing for “biting sarcasm” that “always had enough of a kernel of truth that it stuck.” Around Mendocino County, Scaramella told me, “a third of the people love us, a third hate us, and a third of the people don’t give a shit.” Not a bad breakdown for local news.
Recently, Kendall, too, has informally joined the ranks of AVA writers. One piece, a nostalgic remembrance of bar checks in the early nineties, recalled that certain spots “always carried a unique mixture of locals that sometimes seemed to be a testament to the sociology of our small towns while simultaneously testing the limits of toleration for many folks while under the influence.” Part of the importance and difficulty of the AVA, as at any local news outlet, is that so many of the contributors and commenters know each other. “It’s interesting to see when the sheriff comments,” Scaramella said. “Or the election clerk will explain things to people in the comments.” If some proclaim the AVA to be flippant, irresponsible, or obscene, a good many others read it for exactly these reasons, finding something startlingly honest therein. In Anderson, at this weird moment for politics and news, they find a relatable sensibility. “I have such little respect for traditional media,” he told me. “I can’t imagine functioning in any of their seraglios.”
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