Weekly is tough but cheeky

On Aug. 16, the front page of the Carmel Pine Cone, a serious but cheeky paper that covers the Monterey Peninsula, featured its usual lively mix of news: a photo package about the annual car extravaganza known as the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, plus stories about Carmel’s mounting municipal legal bills, the region’s eternal struggle over water and a stymied airport runway construction project.

But it was the headline over a photo of a huge Monterey pine tree that had fallen onto a Toyota Prius during morning rush hour that caused a tempest: “Tree Smashes Prius on Highway 68 -- but at least it wasn’t a Bentley.”

Paul Miller, 59, the former CBS and NBC network news producer who has owned and edited the weekly Pine Cone since 1997, composed the headline. “I said, ‘Oh my God, a tree fell on a car during Concours week, with all those Bugattis?’ Sure, it was flippant. Because no one was hurt, it seemed like a perfectly fine joke.”

The Toyota’s driver, Arden Eaton, 58, a well-known local disc jockey, was not amused. “People have been coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh my God, I heard about your accident, glad you’re alive, and isn’t Paul Miller a bleep?’ ” said Eaton, who has demanded an apology.

Miller, who must be admired for his ability to milk a controversy, ran letters from angry Prius owners the next week and penned a brief, “Sorry if anyone was offended” non-apology. A week after that, he printed letters from readers defending the headline and wrote a 900-word editorial comparing the impulse behind the Prius headline with the all-too human tendency to laugh when someone slips on a banana peel. The dust-up, he insisted, was “indisputably trivial.”

“Come on, people,” wrote Miller. “Have a brain.”

Whether the issue is news judgment or taste, Miller, who cut his journalistic teeth on network foreign desks, is supremely self-confident. Pressured at least “a hundred times a year” to kill or change stories, he said, he rarely capitulates. “Lots of times people are furious,” he said, “and they stay mad for a long time.”

The Pine Cone, founded in 1918, has become a flourishing local operation -- independent, profitable and known for its blend of hokey local features and aggressive news coverage and advocacy.

The paper has championed a controversial desalination plant for the chronically dry region and is a loud voice against what Miller considers government over-regulation and environmentalist intrusions on free enterprise. His combativeness was on display in a recent editorial, “Why You May Die in a Fiery Plane Crash.” He blamed a judge and “narcissistic activists” for halting construction of new runway space at Monterey Peninsula Airport.

Despite the harsh language and edgy headlines, the weekly is something of a throwback to a gentler newspaper time. The paper does not update its stories the way newspaper websites do. Its three full-time reporters don’t tweet. The paper has posted nothing on its Facebook page since October 2012. Miller is convinced that major metropolitan newspapers could save themselves if they would only follow his lead and stop trying to monetize their websites.

Leafing through a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle at his desk in the Pacific Grove house that is the Pine Cone headquarters, Miller said, “This is something people have done for 200 years, very happily. Now we are told the entire thing is dead, it cannot exist like this anymore, it has to be a click-happy, comment-happy, Twitter-happy experience. I say no. I’m doing the anti-Internet model.”

Miller is lucky to have found a great formula for his weekly, said Alan Mutter, a media analyst and former newspaperman, but it could never work for a large metropolitan newspaper.

“A paper like the Pine Cone is in the absolute sweet spot of the publishing business because it’s creating unique and valuable content about a fairly isolated community where hardly anybody else is doing much coverage,” Mutter said. “The idea that all the information that anybody who lives in Los Angeles could or should want could be contained in the four corners of a PDF is preposterous in the digital era.”

Plus, said Mutter, small businesses that could never afford display ads in a metropolitan newspaper flock to a paper like the Pine Cone.

Every Thursday evening, after the Pine Cone’s print edition has gone to bed, Miller sends an entertaining email highlighting the week’s effort to about 12,000 subscribers. The email has PDF links to the paper. The PDF is an identical copy of the print edition, with full color ads that replicate the print edition. It is static, easy on the eyes and feels pretty much like reading an electronic version of the newspaper, which has a fat real estate section.

Each Friday, 21,000 free copies of the paper are delivered around the Monterey Peninsula (with home delivery in Pebble Beach). And despite the profiles of pets (“She reminds me of Marilyn Monroe,” an owner said recently in a story about her golden retriever, Chloe), the Pine Cone is known for breaking news.

It was first to report that social media billionaire Sean Parker had fallen

afoul of the California Coastal Commission as he planned his lavish Big Sur wedding.

Miller also scored the first post-GOP convention interview with Carmel’s most famous resident, Clint Eastwood, last September. Some locals criticized Miller for portraying negative reactions to Eastwood’s empty-chair stunt as partisan, when many Republicans were mortified.

Despite the enduring and widespread interest

in Eastwood, Miller draws the line on gossip. On Monday, he said he had no plans to cover reports that Eastwood, 83, and Dina, his

wife of 17 years, have split up.

“We won’t be reporting anything about their marriage until we have reliable information,” Miller said in an email. “They both have many friends in this community, so everybody already knows a lot about the situation, and I will wait until I can do something substantial with it before I proceed.”

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robin.abcarian@latimes.com