Snitch: A community newspaper, a scandal sheet, or something else?

Joe Scully
Community Journalism
University of Kentucky
Fall 2005

Lexington publisher and radio personality Tim Woodburn announced Thursday that he would stop publication of his weekly paper, the Lexington Snitch, as of the Nov. 30 issue.

The Lexington Snitch is co-owned by Woodburn, Jeannie Jeffery and Central Kentucky Crime, LLC. The weekly paper reported mainly on local crime and contained a bevy of articles dealing with such. The Snitch celebrated its second anniversary on Oct. 30.

The announcement was the latest in a series of events that saw the Snitch go from being Lexington’s most-read free paper to being out of business in less than a year.

According to an October report by The Media Audit, 63,000 people in Lexington had read The Snitch at least once in the past month. That figure placed it ahead of Ace Weekly, which had a readership of 43,600 in the same poll. At the time of its discontinuance, the Snitch had over 500 indoor distribution points in the city, as well as 32 outside racks.

Despite the positive numbers, Woodburn said, garnering advertising revenue was a problem.
“The Snitch brand and name has not been popular with many major sources of local and national (advertising)- car dealerships, hospitals, banks, quick service restaurants, pizza chains and clothing stores to name five big ones,” Woodburn wrote in his Nov. 30 column.

Woodburn went on to say that it was a combination of the name of the publication and its primary content, which is local crime, that caused advertising agencies to be reluctant to spend their money with the Snitch.

Woodburn called the Snitch “wildly successful,” and said that fewer than 1 percent of the papers distributed were returned. He admitted, however, that, “convincing the president of McDonald’s or St. Joseph’s Hospital that Snitch is an associated image to partner with has been a struggle.”

As a result, Woodburn decided it would be best to close down the Snitch, and launch a new, 48-page monthly magazine-style publication, The Lexington Times, in April.

“My goal,” Woodburn wrote, “is to make the Times the biggest paper in Lexington, one day out of the month.”

Woodburn said the paper will still feature crime stories, but they will relegated to about four pages each issue, rather than being the focal point as had been the case with the Snitch.

“I feel I have a pulse on the community that, when paired with other outstanding local individuals’ contributions, can create an informative, entertaining and diverse publication that will provide readers with investigative stories of not just crime, but other news,” Woodburn said. “The main source of content will be the news. Not feature, not fluff, but news.”

Woodburn, in an October interview, hinted at a possible expansion, saying he saw the growth into a 40-page paper as “the equivalency of eternal longevity.”

“I just want Lexington to have a nice option of a second newspaper,” Woodburn said in October.

Woodburn said in an interview last week that the idea of the Lexington Times was not something he had been planning. He also denied having any knowledge of a potential stopping of the Snitch when he talked about the expanded paper in October.

In addition to the closing of Snitch offices since that interview, Woodburn has been sued by a former business partner.

Brent Boyd, a one-time investor in the Louisville Snitch, filed a suit against Woodburn, alleging misuse of funds. The suit also named Jeannie Jeffery, Woodburn’s business associate.

According to Boyd’s complaint, Woodburn spearheaded the formation of Louisville Crime LLC, an operation he “induced” Boyd to join. Boyd claimed that he loaned Woodburn $40,000, which Woodburn, in his reply to the lawsuit, called a “cash infusion.” Boyd claimed he was never a partner in the operation, and assumed that all funds would be used with the intention of advancing the Louisville Snitch.

According to Boyd’s attorney, Mason L. Miller, the funds were used for “personal indulgences,” which included liquor, trips to night clubs, comic books, groceries and gasoline. The suit also alleges that Jeffery had full knowledge of the spending.

Following the filing of the suit, Woodburn retaliated in print against his former business associate, calling Boyd “lawsuit happy,” and saying he had bragged in the past about suing people.

Boyd responded by filing a defamation lawsuit to accompany his previous suit.

The situation continued to get nasty as Woodburn filed a countersuit, claiming Boyd’s to be frivolous, and began talking openly in the media and on his WVLK radio show, “Tim Woodburn and Sports Central,” about the suit. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported in November that Allan Blaine Chappell, Woodburn’s lawyer, instructed his client to no longer talk about the case.

The Louisville paper ceased publication on Aug. 3, 2005, after eight months.

“Eventually, I hope to start a new publication in that market,” Woodburn said.

Woodburn said the lawsuit had nothing to do with the Snitch ceasing publication, again pointing to difficulty of drawing advertising revenue.

“Lawsuits are a part of this business,” Woodburn said.

This is the third lawsuit in which Woodburn has been named as either a complainant or a defendant in the past five years. One was a personal injury suit filed by Woodburn and the other dealt with his radio show.

It is clear, however, that at least one legal issue is, in part, responsible for his decision to abandon the Snitch.

“I have learned a ton of lessons in purchasing a license of somebody else’s idea,” Woodburn said in his Nov. 30 column, “including the local pros-and-cons associated with that, and I have decided to launch my own idea and publication in the spring.

“This time, there will be no strings attached to another corporate entity.”

The lawsuit is still in its initial phase, as are any potential resolution to the case, Miller said.

Chappell could not be reached for comment.

Despite various problems and obstacles, readership in Lexington remained high until the final issue of the Snitch.

According to a figure cited by the Snitch, the paper had more than 67,000 readers in Lexington. In October, The Media Audit reported that more than 63,000 people read the Snitch at least once a month. This exceeded its closest competitor by more than 15,000 readers.

The Media Audit is a multimedia survey that is conducted with the objective of compiling and developing reliable statistics in terms of audience demographics. According to its Web site, all surveys are conducted during the day and evening, Tuesday through Saturday. The pollsters try to reach a prospective interviewee a maximum of six times throughout the course of a day. The respondents are then sent a questionnaire to complete. They are instructed to read each question thoroughly and answer each honestly. To insure legitimacy, approximately 10 percent of all phone conversations are either monitored or validated by a return call.

Although Woodburn said he believed the Snitch had a broad appeal to the public, many readers responded the same way when asked for this story why they read the publication.

“I read it for the same reason most people do,” said Lawnte Mayfield, co-owner of Choices Barbershop on Georgetown Street. “I like to see whose picture is in there.”

Mayfield was referring to the section entitled “Sentence Watch,” a popular feature which Woodburn takes credit for creating.

“It’s all public information,” Woodburn said in October. “Eventually, we would like to expand on that part of the magazine by running a list of prisoners who are released back into the community.”

Although “Sentence Watch” is a very popular feature, not all readers look forward to seeing photographs of those recently incarcerated.

“I read the Snitch because I find the articles interesting,” said Maggie Demaree of Lexington, “but I find the mug shots depressing. If I can’t see something good about folks, I’d rather not see anything at all.”

In addition to Sentence Watch, a willingness to report stories others publications will not has drawn attention to the Snitch.

Last year, The Snitch dedicated a front-page story to former Lexington Catholic and Marshall basketball standout Von Dale Morton’s legal woes stemming from several incidents of domestic violence. It was even reported in the article that UK basketball coach Tubby Smith had written a letter of appeal on Morton’s behalf prior to one release from jail and a subsequent second term.

Earlier this year, the Snitch reported the name of a woman accusing University of Kentucky basketball star Chuck Hayes of rape. It was the only publication in the state to do so, until the Lexington Herald-Leader did so. The police later dropped the investigation due to lack of evidence.

In its final two issues, the Snitch continued its trend of running stories other papers would not.

In the Nov. 23 edition, the paper featured an interview with Lexington Police Adult Sex Crimes Detective Elizabeth Adams, who investigated the Hayes accusation. Woodburn followed this up in the Nov. 30 edition by interviewing the former Wildcat star’s accuser, Cynthia Wilson-Smithers, and her husband, William Smithers. The Smithers interviews were verbatim accounts of conversations Woodburn had with the accuser and her husband, and ran seven pages in length.

Woodburn majored in journalism at the University of Missouri and freelanced for several publications, but seemed at times to be less of a trained journalist and more like a regular person with a deep curiosity.

He began the interview with Wilson-Smithers by asking questions about topics ranging from the manner in which she and her husband met to a bout with breast cancer. It was noted at the beginning of the piece that the Smitherses only agreed to the interview with the agreement that everything discussed would be printed verbatim. This showed Woodburn’s willingness to go to almost any length to run a story that he thought would be of interest to his reader.

Throughout its two-year history, crime was the main part of Snitch. In most editions of the paper, crime was the lead, with the front page dedicated to at least one, and sometimes more, major criminal case in Lexington or a nearby county.

The majority of the rest of the paper also dealt with crime. From the “Zip Code Crime Watch,” which broke down Lexington’s criminal activity by each neighborhood, all the while attempting to put a slightly humorous spin on cases by poking fun at many of the criminals, to the well-known “Sentence Watch,” the paper was essentially all crime, all the time.

Scattered throughout the paper were occasional stories dealing with sports or music, and, at one time, even a weekly feature by former Sports Illustrated scribe Billy Reed.

The second page of the paper was the only surefire non-crime related piece each week. It contained Woodburn’s column, “Leading Off…,” which he consistently used as his own bully pulpit. Woodburn used the page to speak out about local issues, blast his enemies, pat himself on the back and just about anything else he felt the need to do. Editorials are a key aspect of almost any newspaper, and “Leading Off…” was no exception. It allowed the reader to take a look at Woodburn and get to know his personality, which can be quite entertaining.

During the same October interview in which Woodburn discussed his journalism education and said his ultimate goal was to publish a second Lexington newspaper, he also said, when discussing the ethnically and economically diverse audience of the Snitch, he felt no obligation to inform the public of important issues.

“I don’t view it as a public-responsibility publication,” Woodburn said. “It is pure entertainment value for whites, blacks, Hispanics, whoever.”

Shortly before he said that, he pointed out that he saw the Snitch as nothing more than a means to an end.
“It was a business investment,” Woodburn said. “It was an opportunity to launch a publication, and hopefully expand it. It was strictly done to start a business.”

And expand it, Woodburn has attempted to do.

Aside from the Louisville Snitch, there were also Snitch publications in Columbia, S.C. and San Diego, Calif. Woodburn would not comment on whether he had financial investments in either paper, but neither lasted long. The San Diego paper was last published Feb. 16 and the Columbia paper apparently never got off the ground at all.

Reasons for the failure of the Snitch in larger markets such as Louisville and San Diego could be attributed to the main draw of the paper. In Lexington, it seems so many readers pick the publication up to see who has been arrested and incarcerated. This may work in a city with a 200,000 people, but in a city with a population over a million, it is hard to see it garnering the same interest.

Many Lexington readers seemed to read the Snitch to read about people they knew or were familiar with. The likelihood that readers in a city the size of San Diego would do the same is more of a reach, which could be the reason that its success paled in comparison to the Lexington paper.

Regardless of its shortcomings in other markets, the Snitch was a success, at least in terms of readership and circulation, in Lexington. The Media Audit ranked the Snitch as the most read and circulated weekly or monthly publication in its market over the company’s 30-year coverage of Lexington.

“The Lexington Times will be even more successful than the Snitch,” Woodburn said in an interview last week.

Woodburn promised to use his experiences and connections to ensure a new level of success.

“I have a massive distribution network and have built a relationship with over 300 local advertisers,” he said. “I have bigger goals and dreams. It is time for me to launch a new idea and pursue new horizons.”

Phone: (859) 257-3744, Fax: (859) 323-9879

Al Cross, director , al.cross@uky.edu

Last Updated: February 16, 2006