The Phoenix New Times has a new editor-in-chief.
Sam Eifling comes to the paper after spending many years as a writer. He started out as a New Times reporter in Broward County, Florida, and went on to write features for places like Mother Jones, Sports Illustrated and Grantland. He’s also written for television, and last year he was part of the team that released a serialized podcast about the rise and fall of the New Times empire — part of which he’s now tasked with leading.
It’s a complex task, and Eifling joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: I read this old piece of yours, that you did for the Broward Palm Beach New Times in 2006 about this guy who died in a traffic accident, Jason Louis Livers.
SAM EIFLING: Oh, gosh. That is going way back. So it’s almost 20 years. Yeah. It was just a news item that I found in the Sun Sentinel as a weekly reporter. You’re looking through whatever sources you can, whatever news sources you can grab ahold of to see what are the stories that exist in the community, and what are the ones that maybe haven’t been fully told.
And the item was so small. It was basically that this guy in his mid-20s had gotten out of a car on one of the busiest, craziest, high-flyingest overpasses in the interstate system there and had been struck multiple times and died.
I was like, “Why is anybody up there? What’s going on?” And it was actually one of my favorite stories to report, because I only had that nugget.
And I was able to peel it back and really figure out, OK, here was a kid who’s from a small town in Kentucky. He had come to South Florida and had really gotten caught up in the parties, the abundant openly gay men, which he didn’t have in small town Kentucky, right?
DINGMAN: You write about this in the piece, that this was a place where he could just be himself.
EIFLING: Exactly right. He could let it all out. And he was a person who — and I think we all get to this point at some point in our lives where we’re offered something that we think we really want, and it turns out there’s too much of it. And he was a guy, he was going too hard. He was drinking too much, and he was doing drugs.
It’s funny you bring that piece up. It’s kind of a random piece, but it’s one that I think back on because I really did love the reporting process in that, which was to say, there is more behind this tiny item.
DINGMAN: Totally. Absolutely. For me, that’s what I loved about reading it was this sense of I’ve been to Broward a couple of times, and my main association with it is like strip malls and like Jamba Juices, you know?
And here I read this story — which, as you said, was just like lifted from this little passing news item — and it ends up not just introducing me to this person, but it tells me something about this place, that this place that I might take for granted as something not that interesting is a haven for this person. And all of a sudden, I have this deeper understanding of it in this space of learning about this one guy.
And it struck me as so illustrative of the type of reporting that was possible during that early-2000s time at alt weeklies like the New Times. And now you’re here to lead the Phoenix New Times. Do you feel like there’s an opportunity to bring that kind of reporting back to life?
EIFLING: Yes. Yes and no. It’s a complex question. I think for us, the challenge right now — because so many people’s media consumption is automated on TikTok and on Instagram. You watch, you look at the number of hours people spend on Instagram. It’s bonkers.
DINGMAN: It’s insane.
EIFLING: It’s crazy times, right? We just need a little bit of that attention on the paper. Once upon a time, you went to the bar. You didn’t have a phone in your pocket. Your phone didn’t have every contact of everybody you’ve ever met. It didn’t have shiny apps trying to grab your attention. It didn’t have Tinder, Grindr, whatever you’ve got where people are literally hitting on you through your pocket while you’re sitting there.
It used to be you had to show up and start a conversation with random people at the bar, and a really good way to either kill time or start those conversations was to pick up the alt weekly, which was heavy back then.
DINGMAN: And it was free, and it was probably right outside the bar.
EIFLING: Two hundred pages. It was free. It was going to tell you what’s going on. Here’s something grabby, here’s something sexy, here’s something funny, here’s something weird, here’s something — right?
And a really good weekly, it would hit all these notes. And what you get out of it is totally up to you, right? It’s not Mark Zuckerberg tweaking knobs to decide what you read. It’s people trying to figure out what is going to be interesting and relevant to you.
DINGMAN: Right. Well, the Instagram connection is actually really fascinating, I think, because Instagram now is so much of what an alt weekly used to be. Now you go to the bar, you sit down. If you’re there by yourself, you just scroll through Instagram a little bit because you don’t wanna be sitting at the bar doing nothing. That’s embarrassing.
And what do you go to Instagram for? You go to see pictures from people’s private lives that you arguably maybe you shouldn’t see. You go there to find about what’s cool music. You go there to find, like, “the real story about what’s happening in the news that the mainstream media isn’t telling you,” supposedly. All of which is the kind of thing we used to get from an alt weekly.
EIFLING: Yeah. I think Henry David Thoreau would call it gossip. It all falls under gossip. Reporting is about the reader. Journalism is about the reader. It’s about the audience.
And people who are reading aren’t there. Put us there. Make this cinematic. The reader wants to start forming a movie in their head. Tell it like a dream. You’re trying to hypnotize them for a minute so that they don’t run away and scroll through something else. Put me there more.
DINGMAN: More of a subjective, singular perspective on a place.
EIFLING: I think that’s what we want as readers going to a writer. What people want to know is like, “OK, but what did you really think about that?” And so we should tell them.
DINGMAN: You’re making me think — and tell me if you disagree — that what you’re describing is a meaningful counter to what you get from a TikTok video or an Instagram Reel or something. Because it’s somebody where the camera’s too close to their face. They have food in their mouth. The sound isn’t very good. The image is very jagged, and they’re like openly crying about whatever they’re talking about.
And there’s text going by on the screen. There’s music playing. It’s overwhelming. But I think what resonates with people about that is that it’s authentic.
EIFLING: Well, let us not overlook the incredible power of a really good, well-crafted, well-reported story. That is just ink on and dead trees, and suddenly you’re inhabiting someone else’s life. Are you kidding me? Like, this is awesome stuff.
DINGMAN: So if I may, Sam — and again, tell me if I’m hearing this wrong — coming into this conversation, I thought to myself, you’re a young guy. You’ve worked in all forms of “new media,” whatever that means. And you’re coming to this legacy paper that has obviously gone through a lot of iterations over the decades that it has existed, but it’s still here.
And I could imagine longtime fans of a paper like that thinking, “OK, this new guy here, is he going to take it away from the tree pulp and text roots that it had?” And I feel like what I’m hearing you saying is that you want to double down on writing. You want to invest more deeply in that.
EIFLING: Well, in some ways we’re the keepers of this flame. And what I don’t want to be is a caretaker of something that’s in decline, right? I really would like us to see — that relationship to me, of reader and publication, is one of coconspirator. We should be helping you figure out your best life, helping you understand the community you live in and also being something that you look forward to because it’s kind of, it’s a little off to the side. And it’s for you.
I have tried to do that probably everywhere I’ve worked. I am an easy person to fire. I’ve worked at places where I do not think the bosses really liked what I was doing, because I didn’t really care about them as much as I cared about putting my name on work that was really good.
And man, I think reporting is where it’s at. They have to pay editors more because the job is not as fun honestly.
DINGMAN: All right. Sam Eifling is the newly minted editor-in-chief of Phoenix New Times. Sam, thank you for this conversation. Good luck.
EIFLING: Oh, such a joy. Thank you.
