Life and Times Peter Cox's Journalism Matters BY SAM PFEIFLE
	journalism matters By Peter Cox. Tilbury Press; 376 pages; $20.

It’s fitting that while John Cole’s death in early 2003 was the occasion of a 1B story in the Portland Press Herald, his Maine Times co-founder’s death, Peter Cox’s passing this past November, received simply an obituary, written (like virtually all obituaries in the Press Herald) by his family. While Cox’s obit carried simply his name and age, 67, the Cole story was headed: John Cole, Maine Times founder, dies, only getting more specific with "co-founder" in the first paragraph. Yes, despite the fact that Cox always had controlling interest in the paper, and by the early ’70s Cole’s share of ownership was a mere 12 percent, Cole was always seen as the face of Maine Times, while Cox shouldered much of the editorial, financial, and managerial burden.

That’s just one of the many insights Maine journalism junkies, and news hounds in general, will cull from Cox’s posthumous memoir, Journalism Matters, published earlier this month by Tilbury House. Though Cox maintained respect and admiration for Cole, whom Cox saw as a mentor early in his career, Cox is not as kind to Cole as many of Cole’s obit writers were. He was prone to sensationalizing stories, Cox felt, and he spent money the paper didn’t have, and Cox didn’t appreciate Cole’s attempts to compete with Maine Times after he’d left. Plus, Cox — listed as publisher to Cole as editor — did much of the work for which Cole received public credit.

"I didn’t blink an eye," Cox writes, "when in the 1990s someone would mention Maine Times and refer to it as ‘John Cole’s paper.’ I did sometimes laugh to myself when people said over the years that the paper was not as good as it had been when John Cole edited it. I wanted to ask, ‘Oh, when was that?’ "

In fact, much of the memoir reads as a proud man with a powerful ego grabbing for some of the attention he felt was due to him along the way. Throughout his life, Cox fought to choose the humble path of dedication to others, and in large part he seems to have succeeded. That is not, however, the path to fame and public recognition. He accepted that graciously in his living days and can certainly be forgiven for expounding his virtues in this memoir. He’s due some props.

Beginning with an overly long piece on his father Oscar’s role in the Lend-Lease legislation that helped us win WW2, and the fact that Oscar hid his Jewish heritage from both his son and the world, Cox dedicates a great deal of Matters to his upbringing and education, which introduce us to a personality under construction. At Yale, for instance, he "read the Greek tragedies where I became familiar with the sin of hubris or overarching and therefore destructive pride . . . refusing to identify the signals of one’s own misperceptions can lead to disastrous results."

Later, after a run-in with a superior during his time in the National Guard, Cox notes, "I still hadn’t learned to control my arrogance."

However, working his way up through the journalistic ranks, first as editor of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, then at the Bath Daily Times, Cox picked up an admirable ideal of the role of a local paper in the community. He was fiercely independent, and would not bend his integrity, but he was open and honest, and always accountable to his readers. When the Bath Daily Times merged with the John Cole–edited Brunswick Record, Cox’s work with Cole helped him evolve the theory of journalism "that it was a newspaper’s responsibility to give its readers the information they needed to make sound decisions."

When Cox and Cole partnered up to found Maine Times in 1968, this was the basis for what made the paper different from dailies who saw themselves as merely recorders of history in real time. Cox notes that our own Boston Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Guardian were similarly structuring themselves at the same time, but "we did not know it at the time." They would know it soon, when 60 Minutes featured the movement and cited Maine Times as "among the best of the ‘underground’ press."

It’s interesting that Cox saw his publication as serving more a community of like-minded thinkers than any kind of geographic population, and so made business decisions based on the idea that those people would not be passive readers, but would actually want to support the paper, which meant both buying advertising and supporting those others who advertised in the paper.

Thus, after losing $174,000 in the first three years (a number Cox admits would amount to more than $2 million today), Cox considered Maine Times successful by the time he sold it to Dodge Morgan in 1985 because it turned a modest profit and circulated roughly 16,000 papers weekly. Revenues were about $900,000 yearly. However, it may be that the paper was successful solely because of Cox’s tremendous dedication and calculating and conservative financial management, and that Morgan saw more potential in it than actually existed.

Quickly, the paper was suffering "massive losses, running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year." Cox came back for another editing stint, but became disillusioned with the financial direction. He spares no kindness for Bill Rawlings, whom Morgan brought in to manage the paper, labeling him simply "incompetent." Morgan merged Maine Times with Casco Bay Weekly (which similarly declined under Morgan’s ownership), a move Cox couldn’t have disagreed with more, and the next decade saw the paper sold twice more before it became for a short while a glossy magazine and then ceased publication altogether in January of 2004.

"During its short life, the new publication was so far from what we had intended that if anyone asked me whatever happened to Maine Times, I told them it no longer existed and left it at that," Cox writes.

During the remainder of his life, Cox served on a number of local boards (the Maine Civil Liberties Union, the Portland Museum of Art, a progressive think tank called Eco/Eco), trying, often without success, to more directly influence those constituencies he cared about so much while covering them in his paper. But journalism was his one true passion and there is a tinge of regret throughout these accounts. One gets the feeling that he wished he’d never become "tired" of Maine Times.

For my part, as the editor of an alternative weekly in Maine, with a similar prep-school upbringing and worldview, Cox comes across as a man I very much wish I had gotten to know better than I was able to through a couple of short interviews late in his life. His ideas on alternative journalism so closely mirror those of my mentor, Clif Garboden, that I more than ever feel a part of something larger, part of what it means to be "alternative," a word that’s largely been stripped of real meaning by the marketing people who adopted it as their own in the early ’90s.

Cox quotes extensively from a memo he sent to a reporter early in the paper’s existence: "We cover issues others don’t; we highlight issues and events on the horizon, before they sail into the public domain; we take a clear viewpoint or focus where it applies and where it clarifies, we are more thorough and consequently more accurate in what we report; we strive to maintain a style that does not become a slant . . . without viewpoint, such exploration is a mess."

I know from experience that to say that is one thing, to practice it another. Cox did both.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com