CINCINNATI, OH — Small press and alternative publications have traditionally embraced advertising content that more ostensibly respectable newspaper and magazines shun. Part of the reason for this willingness to embrace lifestyle and professional diversity has to do with reader demographics – and some has to do with simple economics.CityBeat is one of thousands of weekly alternative newspapers in the country. Unfortunately for its publishing and advertising team, its readership resides in Cincinnati – a city nationally famous for its intolerance for saucy content or behavior.
At issue currently are the meat-and-potatoes inexpensive promotional spots that the paper offers to those running “ad service” ads.
Infamous even by conservative stands, Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values (CCV) held a press conference in June in order to promote a letter the group had written demanding that CityBeat remove classified ads for escorts, hot oil massages, and other presumably illegal sex-based enterprises.
As CCV president Phil Burress, an apparently expert on such topics, insisted at the time, “There is no question that the adult classifieds of their print and online editions consist primarily of solicitations for prostitution and promotion of businesses that front for prostitution.”
According to the CCV statement, both the newspaper and its online presence “have become primary avenues through which the sex-for-sale industry in greater Cincinnati markets their destructive services.”
Editor and co-publisher John Fox told Editor & Publisher magazine that harassment from CCV is nothing new for the paper – but support from law enforcement representatives is a new twist.
“The message to use was loud and clear: Stop running all adult-oriented ads or the area’s top cops and prosecutors will come down hard on CityBeat,” Fox observed in an editorial on the publication’s website.
Fox contends that demands to remove the ads are an assault on the paper’s First Amendment rights – even if those putting pressure on the staff include the city’s police chief, a county sheriff, three county prosecutors, and approximately 30 others – including various members of the clergy and CCV. So strongly does the newspaper feel about the issue that it has filed suit against those individuals in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
“The involvement of government officials, especially law enforcement types, presents a clear threat to our ability to run our business as we choose,” Fox explained to Editor & Publisher.
Of special frustration to Fox and his staff is the fact that the same ads that run in CityBeat and have earned such high-profile condemnation also have listings in the Yellow Pages, which are delivered to every metro household. CityBeat, by comparison, must be picked up directly by readers or visited online, where readers must indicate that they are 18 years-of-age or older before viewing adult-oriented advertisements.
“What’s next?” Fox asks in his editorial. “Will local law enforcement demand CityBeat ban all bar and club advertising because some people get arrested for DUIs after visiting bars?”
Law enforcement agents insist that putting pressure on the publication is appropriate since recent “spa” raids in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky indicated prostitution links – and many advertised in the pages of CityBeat.
Local First Amendment attorney H. Louis Sirkin represents CityBeat. Sirkin is also involved in legal proceedings meant to amend Ohio’s version of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which requires those convicted of sex-related crimes – including being a cashier or manager at an adult store determined to have sold “obscenity” – to register as sex offenders for 15 years.
