For the next few months, Brouner wrote about the cinema a few more times, reminding readers that the theater wasn't accessible (and once saying he'd rather "drink a bucket of warm spit" than support it). Since 48-year-old Brouner met his wife, Joelle, in 1996--she's used a wheelchair her entire life, due to cerebral palsy--he's considered disability access a civil rights issue. The last week of June, after cinema owner Paul Doyle--along with other unhappy Columbia City folks--alerted the paper's publisher, Mike Dillon, to Brouner's coverage of the cinema and other neighborhood organizations, Brouner was fired. (Dillon later acknowledged that he hadn't been following the story on his own.)
For the next month, a rival South Seattle paper--the Seattle Star--sparred with Dillon's paper. The back and forth barbs have taken the focus off of Brouner's story, and thrown the spotlight on the competition between the two South End papers and their different styles. The Beacon Hill News tends to cover community events, while the Star spills ink on South End issues, like race and policing. Now, the two papers are arguing over basics like the line between advertisers and editorial.
Most community newspapers--like the Beacon Hill News--toe the line between writing honestly about their neighborhood and keeping advertisers happy. The small papers, after all, rely on support from businesses right down the street, so it's safer to write about neighborhood festivals and people who've won awards than to delve under the neighborhood's surface.
Brouner was breaking those traditional rules by writing about the cinema's accessibility--though he still filled the more tradition "booster" role. "I wrote all kinds of fluff about Columbia City," he says. But he also took his editorial stance against the cinema one step further when he did a controversial June 3 story that revealed neighborhood groups--like the cinema, plus the Columbia City Farmers Market, and the monthly BeatWalk--were illegally hanging banners from a pedestrian overpass on Rainier Avenue South.
Brouner called around City Hall asking about the banners and discovered the big overapass signs weren't legal. "Suddenly I got a call from the city," says Doyle, whose banner was advertising a showing of Shrek 2. "[They] wrote me up a little citation that said I had to take it off immediately." The BeatWalk and Farmers Market's banners also came down.
The neighborhood groups weren't happy over losing their prominent ad spot. Critics say Brouner's "vendetta" against the cinema drove his story. Theater owner Doyle wrote to publisher Dillon, outlining Brouner's "focused venom" against Columbia City. Brouner lost his job, and Dillon attended a Columbia City Business Association meeting to apologize for the perceived anti-Columbia City bias of his paper.
That's when the Seattle Star jumped in. The Star, launched in 2002 (coincidentally, with Brouner as editor, where he oversaw coverage of things like impending Sound Transit construction), ran a July 14 editorial blasting Dillon's decision to fire Brouner. "[T]here is a perception that advertising pressure caused the newspaper to restrain its editorial content," the Star's editor, Margie Slovan, wrote. "Brouner discovered that members of the community were doing something that was illegal, and he informed the rest of us.... for doing his job, Brouner lost his job." The editorial was fitting for the scrappy paper, which this week launched a series examining the shrunken Seattle Police Department gang unit, and has earned a reputation for doing heavier stories on race, politics, crime, and education. "There seems to be more meat in the Seattle Star," says Darryl Smith, head of the Rainier Chamber of Commerce.
In the next issue of the Beacon Hill News, Dillon fired back, defending his paper's standards. Calling Slovan's editorial "perfectly, damnably wrong," he said Brouner was fired not due to advertiser pressure, but because his personal agendaconflicted with his editor role. "We keep the line between advertising and editorial clear and firm," Dillon told The Stranger.
In the Star's July 28 issue, publisher Wallis Bolz, also chair of the neighborhood business association, shot right back "Dillon... only became aware of Brouner's unflattering coverage of the Columbia City Cinema when merchants brought the issue to his attention," Bolz wrote. "Just which part of Margie's contention is untrue, Mike?"
