What’ll happen to weeklies in the new times?

It used to be that alternative weekly newspapers were like that Marlon Brando line from “The Wild One” -- when someone asked him what he was rebelling against and he replied, “Wadda ya got?” There was war in Vietnam and an international nuclear stare-down, economic injustice and racial inequality, and a dominant corporate culture against which nonconformity was a political statement.

Cut to late 2005. A half-century after New York’s Village Voice launched the genre of alternative weeklies, there’s still plenty of war, injustice and corporate domination around. But the anti-establishment counterculture has moved topside. Rock ‘n’ roll jingles hawk luxury cars, mutual funds come with social consciences and alternative weeklies have become a profitable, parallel universe to the mainstream media.

In an unmistakable sign that the counterculture has morphed into corporate culture, federal regulators last month signed off on a merger that will wed the free-circulation LA Weekly, OC Weekly and four other Village Voice Media alternative papers with the 11-paper New Times chain. Sometime in the next few weeks, the reconfigured Village Voice Media will become the nation’s largest family of alternative newspapers, stretching from Greenwich Village to L.A., and from Seattle to Miami.

But in this version of “Yours, Mine & Ours,” the looming marriage has some of the kids at the 210,000-circulation LA Weekly a little nervous about what this new family might feel like.

“No one knows what’s going to happen, and that just naturally feeds a lot of fears,” says Steven Mikulan, a 21-year LA Weekly veteran and head of the union that represents the editorial staff. “I have never known any sort of regime change here that hasn’t been followed by a lot of hand-wringing and expectations that the world was going to end. Who knows? Maybe the world will end this time.”

At the heart of the current cycle of fear and loathing lies a cruel reality for veterans of the six-year battle between the old-line liberal LA Weekly and the less ideological, and more pugnacious, New Times LA, which closed in October 2002.

In truth, the merger is more of a takeover, and New Times executives will be running the show. For the LA Weekly staff, that’s like being eaten by a monster they thought they had already killed.

New Times LA opened in 1996, after buying out the old LA Reader and LA View, promptly closing them both and creating itself from the ashes as a challenger for L.A.’s alternative crown. That newspaper war ended when New Times closed the L.A. paper and Voice Media closed a Cleveland paper, each ceding the local alternative turf to the other -- the kind of corporate collusion an alternative weekly could usually be counted on to attack.

The federal Department of Justice objected, and the chains settled the complaint by admitting no guilt but paying fines of up to $375,000 each and agreeing to sell off assets of the closed weeklies. Southland Publishing, owner of the Pasadena Weekly and Ventura County Reporter, won the L.A. auction and created the downtown-centric CityBeat, now the city’s second-largest alternative weekly with a free circulation of 100,000.

Regulations bar New Times executive editor Michael Lacey and CEO James Larkin, who will run the new company, from discussing possible changes with the Voice papers until the merger is completed. But few rumor mills churn as quickly as those inside newsrooms facing an information vacuum.

“You can’t stop journalists from worrying and fearing the worst,” says LA Weekly editor Laurie Ochoa. “We can’t be sure how it’s going to turn out. If what the New Times wants is to do quality journalism, I don’t think we should have a problem because that is what we want to do too. But there will certainly be an adjustment period.”

One possible clash point: Several of the Voice papers, including the LA Weekly, are unionized. New Times is not, though Lacey has been quoted as saying contracts will be honored.

Two consensus scenarios about the Weekly’s future have emerged among observers. The first is that the new regime will not mess with the publication’s financially successful identity as the paper of record for L.A. political progressives. The other is that Lacey, who has a history of openly disparaging the overt politics of the Weekly and other Voice papers, will force a change in tone.

“Absolutely it’s going to change,” says Eric Almendral, former art director for the New Times chain, including New Times LA. “New Times and LA Weekly have different approaches to journalism, different missions in what they want to accomplish.”

Where the LA Weekly struck a tone of liberal skepticism and outrage, the New Times looked at the world with open cynicism, a stance replicated at most of its papers, many of which don’t run editorials or endorse candidates. They have more of a tabloid feel -- aggressive and impolite. In Phoenix, the chain’s flagship paper has reported that popular Republican Sheriff Joe Arpaio barred its reporters from some of his events over its coverage of his office, including complaints about jail conditions.

“New Times focused more on what they could find out -- it was hard journalism, really investigative stuff,” says Almendral, now art director for the L.A.-based Filter music magazine. “They really like breaking the big political stories.”

But not all the journalism was well-received.

“I think they’re an abomination,” says state Assembly member Jackie Goldberg, one of L.A.’s emblematic political leftists who was a frequent target of New Times LA columnists. “They don’t represent the standards of journalism. They would do a hit piece on somebody, including me, and not call to fact-check, not call to get a response. So it became just, ‘Let’s sell newspapers by being outrageous.’ It reminded me a lot of talk radio. They were not just a gadfly, they were an assault vehicle.”

Critics of the New Times approach -- and there are many -- view the merger, and the return of New Times’ journalism to L.A., with trepidation.

“I think it’s disgraceful,” said Sharon Delugach, longtime Los Angeles labor activist and current aide to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “I don’t see how it couldn’t change [the LA Weekly], unless they give it complete editorial freedom, and that hasn’t been their pattern....But if it changes the character and tenor of the reporting and their editorial practices, I think that’s really just a crying shame.”

Yet the Weekly isn’t as crucial to the city’s lefty political circles as it once was. The view is still from the Jerry Brown side of the political divide, but the emphasis has moved more to lifestyle -- L.A.’s arts, movie and club scenes. And with the Internet’s emergence as a virtual organizing tool for activists, many progressives -- such as Goldberg -- no longer read the LA Weekly as often or as closely as they used to.

Former Assembly member and ‘60s activist Tom Hayden said the LA Weekly -- and CityBeat -- “are important for perspective and analysis but are a far cry from the alternative press of the ‘60s.” Given the dominance of the Los Angeles Times as the region’s journalistic engine, local television’s lack of depth and progressive radio programming limited to a handful of stations, alternative news finds its outlet most regularly through the Internet, he said.

“I find that the ‘indymedia’ and Internet have displaced these other channels to a significant extent,” Hayden said. “It’s not that an alternative progressive newspaper isn’t desperately needed here, but people have learned to adjust to the void by creatively inventing and sharing their own means of communication.”

Regina Freer, chair of the politics department of Occidental College’s Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, said the LA Weekly was the “key media source” for coverage of the city’s political progressives during the 1980s and into the 1990s, and many of the people it profiled have moved into positions of power in city government.

“This unique coverage gradually declined toward the end of the 20th century and there is a bit of a vacuum,” Freer said. “Of course, the rise of the Web coincided with this decline, so progressives now communicate much more directly with one another. The concern this raises is whether this offers enough of an opportunity for broader audiences to engage with and challenge progressive opinion.”

Yet Ochoa says the LA Weekly, despite its liberal outlook, doesn’t view itself as a bulletin board for liberal causes.

“I don’t want the paper to be perceived as a predictable organ of the left,” Ochoa says. “The paper is a progressive, left-wing paper and I don’t think that will change. But I think you have to push ideas and issues so that people will be more challenged in their thinking, not just accept a left-wing position without thinking it through.”

Some people are already gambling that the Weekly will no longer even play that role, and that the New Times will create a void on the political left for another alternative paper to fill.

Martin Albornoz, co-founder of the biweekly 60,000 free-circulation L.A. Alternative Press, turned his paper at the beginning of December into a weekly. The target audience: the LA Weekly’s progressive-liberals, whom he’s courting by adding Robert Scheer’s column, recently and controversially dropped by the Los Angeles Times op-ed page.

Albornoz believes locally owned aggressive weeklies -- like his -- will have a chance to grow.

“I do see the merger as weakening the LA Weekly’s position in the city, and weakening it editorially,” Albornoz said. “That’s where we’re going to try to step in.”

One of the big unanswered questions is whether the Weekly’s new overseers will decide the paper can do the same job with fewer people. Or with different people. Village Voice Editor Don Forst, for example, announced on Dec. 5 that he would be leaving at the end of the year.

Ochoa doesn’t know yet if she will be kept on in Los Angeles, and there’s growing concern among longtime progressive readers of the Weekly that she might be bumped for Rick Barrs, who as editor of the New Times LA gave space to conservative writers such as columnist Jill Stewart. He was also openly derisive of the LA Weekly as a “pathetically dull” publication whose “cast of characters has got to be the wackiest in show business.” (Both Ochoa and Barrs are former L.A. Times staffers.)

The L.A. Times’ late media critic, David Shaw, a frequent Barrs target, once described Barrs’ column “The Finger” as “odious diatribes” -- though Barrs scooped the city with a column revealing that the L.A. Times had agreed to share with Staples Center revenues from a special Sunday magazine issue on the new arena.

Such was “The Finger’s” reputation, though, that few took the item seriously until it was repeated in the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Barrs, now editor of the New Times paper in Phoenix -- which Lacey and Larkin founded in 1970 -- says he hasn’t talked with Lacey about a possible return to L.A. “I’ve gotten a hundred phone calls and e-mails, both pro and con, about coming back to town,” Barrs says. “I’d have mixed emotions about it, to tell you the truth.... I kind of like it here.”

Barrs, who stressed that he has no inkling of what New Times hopes to do with the Voice papers, said the six years that New Times LA existed was “a good time.” While the outside perception might have been that the two weeklies were competing, he says they were more complementary, a sense Ochoa and longtime weekly readers share.

“We just weren’t the ideological paper the Weekly was,” Barrs says. “In my mind, the New Times was about news coverage and journalism. Not that [the LA Weekly] didn’t do journalism, but their columnists and stories were kind of, ‘All the lefty news that’s fit to print.’ We weren’t like that. We didn’t do editorials, we didn’t have an editorial philosophy.”

Barrs took pride in the New Times’ inclusion of columnists like Stewart, whom he described as a Libertarian -- and the kind of voice that would never get play in the LA Weekly. The title of his own column reflected the paper’s confrontational view of the world -- it was left for the reader to decide whether “The Finger” referred to the middle digit extended, or the index finger jabbed in an eye.

“We’ll have some fun -- it’ll be fun again,” Barrs says. “I think New Times will inject a little bit of life into the Weekly.”