“There ain’t no innocent victims,” says Anthony Sanders.
Sanders, a soft-spoken man, is talking about homicides in St. Louis, but his claim could also serve as a credo for the weekly paper he edits, The St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl, which bills itself as “America’s Leading Crime Fighting Publication.”
But think about that: Can you name another crime-fighting publication? It would seem the Whirl stands alone, straddling the worlds of journalism and…well, Batman, but Batman with a cynical, urban twist. Consider this recent front-page Whirl item:
“A 44-year-old hoodrat from Jennings has been charged with beating her live-in boyfriend with a trophy.” The woman “has been charged with elder abuse and armed criminal action after beating her 69-year-old boyfriend on July 27.” The woman, “who is too lazy to get off her ass and work herself, told the victim that he needed to get a job because the pension and Social Security money she was leeching off of him wasn’t enough for her. When the victim suggested that Reed get the f—k out of his house, she picked up the trophy and beat the victim in the head, face and body! He had to be hospitalized, according to court documents. (That is what he gets for having a ‘trophy’ girlfriend.)”
This is vintage Whirl, in its ability to report the police blotter and simultaneously moralize; to pile on the charges against the woman, who is named in the paper, as though the assault weren’t enough and she must be tagged with laziness, too; and to suggest that the elderly man she clubbed with a trophy got his just desserts. That there are no innocent victims.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Whirl boasts impressive readership in greater St. Louis, with more than 50,000 copies sold each week for a dollar apiece, employees say. Crime might not pay for perps, but it does for someone. The Whirl’s stance—along with its purplish prose, its fondness for exclamation marks, and its double row of mug shots running down the front page—seems to bolster its bottom line. After a dip in the 1990s, it’s doing as well or better than it ever has, and the publisher is hoping it’s poised to go even further online, beyond what almost any other newspaper—straight or crime fighting—has achieved.
The paper was founded in 1938 by Benjamin Thomas, a dapper man about town who set out to cover the city’s black night life, only to discover that he had a bigger audience for crime news. So that became his mission, one that remains with the paper today: to cover and expose crime. As Benjamin’s faculties declined in the early 1990s, Barry Thomas, the elder of two sons, took over the paper. Sanders, who is 62, became editor-in-chief in 1995.
“When I first took it over, it was almost run into the ground because of my dad’s illness and the people surrounding him,” Thomas says, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, where he’s an architect.
The circulation had dropped precipitously, to just a few thousand copies. Sanders expanded the staff, which now comprises eight to 10 full-time employees and many more contributors, and worked at improving the paper as the circulation climbed back. Lately, the Whirl has branched out a bit, too, incorporating political columns and entertainment news in its eight broadsheet pages. Though crime remains the marquee subject, the paper’s entertainment news doesn’t lack for sometimes-revealing photos of young ladies at nightclubs.
“You have to change with the times,” says Thomas, who is 50. “The paper started out as entertainment, and ironically, we’re kind of shifting back into that. With the young crowd, you have to give them what they like. Readers want a balance. They don’t want to just see crime all the time.”
Yet the Whirl is still “very much a component of law enforcement,” Sanders says. He’s talking at a Saint Louis Bread Company in the Central West End, where he’s chosen to meet, accompanied by Jason Bailey, the Whirl’s executive editor, and Christopher Hawkins, its chief photo editor. Sanders works out of his home, not far away. For a newspaper editor, he’s a bit media-shy. “I don’t like the publicity, personally,” he says, pointing out that the home of the paper’s founder was firebombed several times. “We work against criminals.”
Sanders gets copy from his editors and contributors on Sunday, he says, edits it and lays it out in one marathon stretch from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., sends the computer files to an outstate printer, and has the papers trucked back to St. Louis and on streets and racks by Monday. Some of its contents are online, too, at thewhirlonline.com, but Thomas says in the next three or four months there’ll be more digital Whirl: He plans to sell complete, downloadable issues at the website. “I think we might be one of the few newspapers that could pull that off, because of our unique content.”
Years back, when the paper was under Benjamin Thomas’ leadership, there were concerns expressed by civil-rights leaders that the Whirl painted too negative or incomplete a picture of the black community. “Some of our local anointed leadership still feel the same way,” Sanders says. “There are people who will look down their noses at what we do… Ben did some things back in the day that we have totally gotten away from—the straight-out criticisms of clergy, politicians, and businesspeople. We don’t crusade. We hit this stuff”—crime—“and move on, because there’s always new stuff to cover.”
The paper’s diction has remained informal, but has evolved with the times. Where its founder was given to rhyming couplets that evoked the blues and Stagger Lee—and later, the swagger of Super Fly—these days, its prose feels more like the printed lyrics of gangsta rap. The essential amorality remains, though, the sense of an amused bystander at a pageant of the damned.
Gentry Trotter is the paper’s publisher-at-large, in addition to working with a host of local public-relations ventures. He has been associated with the paper for eight years and is also responsible for the newspaper’s columns, which can read like a more-serious filling of uplift between the mayhem and tight dresses, a New Testament sermon following Old Testament wrath and preceding temptation. The Whirl today is “trying to do more to help people and stop making fun of people,” Trotter says by phone. “The problem was, Ben would beat up on victims, and what I’ve tried to do is work with Anthony and say, ‘Hey, guys, we’ve got to take another step, and try to beat up on the criminals and shame them, but at the same time we have to have pity on the victims.”
Shame sells. Between 75 and 80 percent of the paper’s revenue comes from single-copy sales. With a cover price of $1 and sales of at least 52,000 copies a week, according to Trotter, that comes to a gross, including ad sales, of about $3.4 million a year. The Whirl is sold at about 400 locations in the city, primarily at North Side gas stations and liquor stores. The staff figures at least two people read every issue on average, giving them an audience of at least 100,000, many of whom, Sanders says, are “the poorest people in this area.” They’re careful, though, not to distribute the paper to barber or beauty shops, they say, where too many people might pass it around instead of buying it. The readership has also become less black over time, Thomas says, estimating that about 65 percent of its readers are black today.
Bailey, the executive editor, who is 37, grew up in Columbia. St. Louis, he says, “can be an extremely nefarious place. There are many notorious characters that roam the streets. Gunshots ring out on the North Side constantly.” Similarly, he says, the style of the Whirl “is extremely in-your-face, very point-blank. We call a spade a spade. A criminal is a criminal.” And business is good: “Crime isn’t going anywhere. People still get robbed. And I’ve been mugged, with a gun in my face, right up the street.” As for cavils that some have had about the Whirl’s unorthodox spelling, punctuation, and grammar, he says, “We’re expanding at a time print publications are dying. Laugh all you want.”
Even if crime waxes and wanes, there’s always bad news, it seems. “You might have a good week where you have a robbery,” says Brian Ireland, the Whirl’s managing editor, who oversees its crime coverage. “There’s weeks where I’m just writing about fires and car accidents. You’re always going to have homicides, and that’s good, and drug busts, that’s huge, that’s always going to be our focus. People want to know where the drug corners are, where we’re seeing narcotics detectives, what districts are trending up, whether it’s property crimes or drug crimes.”
Ireland is 38. He’s been with the paper for seven years, since he dropped out of law school in New York and moved back to St. Louis to work at the Whirl. (“Reading case law,” he says, by comparison, “was a little dry.”) More than half of the paper’s crime stories come from the police, he says, “either a report or something you hear on the scanner.” The rest come from tipsters, among other places. There really isn’t any competition for what they do, he says. “The goal is to be as comprehensive and thorough when it comes to city crime as we can. I think we’re close to being there now. You know, if a crime makes the Post-Dispatch, they might only be able to devote a paragraph to it, a small mention, where that could be a front-page story for us.”
Michelle Robertson, an administrative clerk with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s Public Information Division, says that as far as she knows, the Whirl gets from the police “the same information that all media sources get.” Beyond that, Robertson says, “they get information from somewhere, but I’m not sure where they’re getting it.” Is she a fan?
“I don’t particularly care for it,” Robertson says, measuring her words. “Just the way they word some of their stuff. They use a lot of slang. Some of it is kind of vulgar.” Told that they see themselves as a crime-fighting newspaper, almost an extension of the police, Robertson says, “Uh, no.”
“We’re always going to have critics,” says Thomas. “My dad had critics, we have critics. We can’t appease everybody, but it’s obviously a popular newspaper, and the vindication is that we get more compliments than complaints.” When he was growing up, Thomas says, “I was maybe a little bit embarrassed by it, to be honest with you…but what changed for me is learning more of what the mission of the paper is, and just learning a little bit more about my dad’s philosophy. Which is, why should we be nice to criminals?
“I’ve learned to be comfortable with the paper’s style over the years,” he continues. “Anthony and I would love to be a little more mainstream, but you know, when we first took the paper over we tried to do that, took the mug shots off the front page, put them inside, and we lost sales, nobody wanted it, so we had to go back and give them what they wanted. Over the process of doing this, we’ve learned to appreciate more what my father started. I think people may have a little bit of a hard time with the way it’s packaged, but it’s for an urban environment.”
Ireland, who calls the Whirl “a street bible,” says he’s unabashedly proud of it. “It really is like the Ladue News, like the social paper for the inner city. And then there’s the other aspect: It’s a guilty pleasure, like a combination of XXL and the New York Post and maybe Penthouse.”
“You know, it’s like a cigarette,” Trotter says. “The Whirl has become the same thing. It’s addictive. Once you get ahold of it, you’d rather have a Whirl than a White Castle.”
It’s probably beyond dispute that the Whirl week in and week out condemns crime explicitly, even as some would say it implicitly celebrates it. Its editors concede as much when, among other testimonials, they cite criminals who have been known to keep a stash of back issues as a kind of scrapbook. This is actually a familiar strain in journalism, even if it’s not what we’ve come to expect from more mainstream news sources. One sees the same thing in the wildly popular Mexican narcocorridos, songs that both condemn and extol drug-runners, and closer to home, in the knowledge that Billy the Kid was a thug and is a legend, or the credible argument that The Godfather, a saga of robbery, beatings, and extortion, is the greatest American movie. The Whirl, finally, is just more forthcoming about all of those contradictions.
