The Arcata Eye

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The Arcata Eye is a newspaper which describes itself as "the mildly objectionable weekly newspaper for Arcata, California." The paper was started and is currently owned and edited by Kevin L. Hoover. It covers news relevant to citizens of the City of Arcata and surrounding environs. Topics such as homelessness, environmental issues, city council meetings, festivals, fundraisers and the local semi-pro baseball team are often found within its pages. The paper has gained minor notoriety for the style of its articles and its police log (see the Controversy section). It is widely circulated in Arcata.

[edit] History

The Arcata Eye was born in 1996 after another local weekly newspaper the Arcata Union, a paper started in 1886, went out of business. While The Union had shown some lag in profits this was not the reason for its demise. It was terminated by the owner, Patrick O'Dell, in an effort to consolidate his Humboldt County newspaper holdings into a single paper; the Humboldt Beacon run out of Fortuna. Kevin L. Hoover was a reporter with The Union at the time of its termination and realized that a niche had opened.

Hoover scraped together enough funding and launched The Arcata Eye. The Eye, as it is often called by locals, was a very different paper from The Union. The logo depicted an eyeball and it had a unique and prominently placed police log (Hoover had run a "drier" police log at The Union). Likely due to its "new thrust in journalism," and its close allegiance with Arcata's "more colorful side," the paper quickly gained in popularity and size (see [1]). While The Arcata Eye has been the center of some controversy (see below) it is generally considered the paper of record for Arcata.

[edit] Controversy

The Arcata Eye has gained a reputation for its police logs and recurring themes about local street life. The police log has gained a large following inside and outside (mainly through online publication) of Arcata because it takes interesting tidbits in local police reports and couches them in "witty" language. Two books collecting together a selection of police logs have been published. The logs, while popular with many readers, have caused some controversy and have even been called bigoted toward homeless people. The newspaper's owner Kevin Hoover has popularized the term "plazoid" to describe those homeless that hang out on the city's central square (The Plaza), streets, and in other city parks. This term, as well as some of the newspaper's coverage of the homeless issue, has incited a backlash by homeless activists.