Advertising’s steady exodus from print to the Web has shut down newspaper presses from Seattle to Tucson. The Arizona Guardian is online only and charges monthly subscriptions of up to $150.

The Master Mind
Behind the scenes of the Guardian’s business model is Bob Grossfeld, who may be every bit the Wizard of Oz people think he is in this fledgling operation. He holds the title of publisher, but his role at the Guardian is a mystery to many outsiders. His name appears just once on the Website, and unlike the four journalists who own an equal stake in the company, there is no biography accompanying it. On most days, too, Grossfeld is nowhere to be found in the small, one-room office the Guardian maintains adjacent to the Capitol campus.

Instead, the 60-year-old spends much of his time at an office in downtown Tempe, where, to many political insiders, there is no mystery about what he does. Grossfeld, you see, is one of them: the ultimate political insider. A Democratic strategist, he has been involved in Arizona politics for more than 30 years, generally fighting for any number of left-leaning candidates or causes. His résumé includes work on the congressional staff of U.S. Representative Bob Carr of Michigan in the 1970s and consulting on Arizona issues for Bill Clinton’s presidential victories in 1992 and 1996.

Today, Grossfeld is best known as the head of The Media Guys, a Tempe-based political consulting firm, which does most of its work out of state. In 2006, Grossfeld’s company was behind a headline-making political ad in Virginia that attacked incumbent U.S. Senator George Allen, a Republican who was running for re-election at the time. Paid for by the group VoteVets.org, the ad featured a soldier of the Iraq War accusing the senator of voting against lifesaving body armor for the troops. “The difference is life,” the Army reservist says to the camera, pointing out the bullet-riddled remains of the current vests, “or death.”

The senator’s supporters dismissed the ad as misleading, saying it skewed what the bill in question had actually been meant to do. That November, Allen lost to Democrat Jim Webb by less than 1 percent of the vote.

Grossfeld’s left-leaning views put him in the minority when it comes to Arizona politics. So it’s no wonder his involvement with a supposedly non-partisan news startup has raised the eyebrows of local journalists and politicos, who question whether Grossfeld’s politics might seep into the Guardian’s news coverage.

The key for the Arizona Guardian’s success is for the Website to provide essential information that Arizona policy wonks and political junkies can’t get anywhere else. If it can do that, people will pay for it.

Le Templar, one of the journalists who survived the East Valley Tribune’s cuts, raised the question just before his former colleagues launched their site in early January. “Grossfeld works for Democrats and progressive groups,” Templar wrote on the Tribune’s Website, “so Epler, Giblin, Welch and Reinhart will have to demonstrate quickly in writing their commitment to keep Grossfeld’s politics out of the Guardian’s pages.”

Since that time, few, even from the political right, have made any public accusations of bias at the Guardian, and those have largely been no more than the typical “liberal media” rants most news organizations endure.

During a sit-down interview this spring at a coffee shop near The Media Guys’ office, Grossfeld says he has zero influence over the stories and topics that the Guardian covers. The journalists there won’t let him near any of it, he says.

“They’d kill me,” Grossfeld says, “and they should. They’d slit my throat.” In fact, he says, being part of the Guardian’s efforts has cost his other company, The Media Guys, business. Though he offers nothing to confirm his suspicion, Grossfeld says he believes clients have passed on him because they are afraid he will leak sensitive information to his journalists. “They don’t have to tell me,” he says. “I can see it.”

Despite having to keep his hands off of the Guardian’s reporting, Grossfeld still somehow manages to have his fingers in the small company every day. He describes his role as a behind-the-scenes problem solver, somebody who understands both business and technology more than any of the journalists he works with.

In the beginning, he says, he laid down $10,000 of his own money to open the company’s first bank account, though only a little more than $2,000 of that was used to pay certain startup costs. He also handled many of the basics. He drafted the corporate paperwork so the Guardian could legally do business in Arizona. His staff at The Media Guys built the Guardian’s Website from scratch. He helped the journalists develop a brand name. Laying down the foundation, he says, was easy for him. It would have been more daunting for the journalists. “It’s a learning curve,” he tells me. “As a group, they’re not technologically oriented. But they’ve all stretched.”

That said, Grossfeld can hold his own in any conversation about the problems ailing journalism these days. Amid the background chatter and rattle of this Tempe coffee shop, Grossfeld lowers his voice a notch and gets very serious when talking about the layoffs taking place at media outlets around the Valley. He summons the moral outrage of someone the likes of David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and the creator of television’s The Wire – the cop drama that used its final season in 2008 as an indictment of corporate media.

“This is just wrong,” Grossfeld says. “This is just plain frickin’ wrong that these veteran reporters that know stuff are just going to be turned loose, never to be heard from again.”

Newspapers were mismanaged at the highest levels, Grossfeld adds, often by outside conglomerates that bought up local newspapers and tried to make an easy profit. “I’m not... a bleeding-heart liberal,” he says. “I’ve been in business a long time now, and sometimes you have to make tough choices. But I wasn’t seeing tough choices. I was seeing easy choices being made. There are a lot of alternatives to axing people.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a newspaper or television executive who agrees with that sentiment nowadays. Although many news organizations were still turning a profit earlier in the decade, some of the nation’s most storied institutions are now running deep in the red, leaving few choices.

The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, announced earlier this year it was racking up losses of about $1 million a week. In April, The Boston Globe was on track to end the year $85 million in the red and just narrowly avoided closing after its unions agreed to major cutbacks. The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s longest continually published newspaper, was not so lucky. It was shut down in February after its parent company announced it had lost nearly $21 million in just three months. Even Portfolio magazine, just days after writing about Giblin’s Pulitzer win, shut its doors this spring.

And after determining the Tucson Citizen, Arizona’s oldest newspaper, was losing some $10,000 a day, its parent company killed its print edition and laid off most of its staff. Only a few reporters were kept on to run a Website geared toward local blogs and commentary.