Photo by Craig Carlson

Denise Carabet: “When was the last time a covey of women went out and got a job?”

On a gray February morning not long ago, in the second-floor dining room of the University Club in downtown San Diego, about twenty businessmen who belong to a group known as the Metropolitan Club pushed aside their breakfast plates and coffee cups and prepared to listen to a guest speaker.

Sol Price had arranged for the press conference to announce that he was considering opening a new discount store in San Diego.... "Denise leaned back, lit a cigarette, sort of flashed her pen around, and said, ‘Sol, it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if it’ll work.’"

Photo by Craig Carlson

The club, a loose gathering of bankers, investment counselors, and self-employed entrepreneurs, meets for breakfast every other week, and although there are no restrictions on admitting women, to the last individual the members are men. The speaker this morning, however, was a woman: Denise Carabet, editor of the San Diego Business Journal.

The collapse of the U.S. Financial Corporation (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. financial history at that time) and the downfall of C. Arnholt Smith’s corporate empire were almost too good to be true. “Every day was like a high."

Photo by Craig Carlson

“Good day to you all,” Carabet began. “Your morning is going to start out with a highly opinionated account of what it’s like to be editor of a weekly financial newspaper. ...” For the next twenty minutes Carabet talked about the start-up of her twenty-one-month-old publication, which, it turned out, a majority of the club members had read. She worked in a few anecdotes, but most of them were told too hastily and didn’t go over well. It was when she talked about partnerships or buy-outs or marketing strategy that she spoke with authority, and it was then that the businessmen in attendance leaned forward and listened closely to what she had to say. At the end of her talk Carabet lit a cigarette, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth in a thin, highly propelled stream, and then told the group: “Ask questions. I love to answer them.”

While she was at the Union, Bauder wouldn’t discipline any of the writers in his department.

Photo by Craig Carlson

It was a command, not an invitation. But it was nothing new for Denise Carabet. That’s her style, sharpened to a fine point over the nine years she’s been a journalist covering San Diego’s business scene. Along with a great natural intelligence and charm, that style has made her one of the top two business writers in the city, and a sought-after speaker who commands the attention (and, in a few cases, the ear) of the leading businessmen in the area. "Denise has a way of being incisive,’' says E.L. McNeely, chief executive officer of the Wickes Companies.

While local businessmen seem to like the Journal, most of them haven’t seen fit to advertise in it.

Photo by Craig Carlson

Photo by Craig Carlson

“She can find the jugular. She doesn’t get stifled by the terminology that is used (in business]; she’s able to digest it and spit it out.” Peter Davis, president of the Bank of Commerce, says that he not only finds Carabet’s Journal a good source of information but considers Carabet herself a good business contact. “I look upon Denise as running a small business just like I do,” he explains. “For that reason we probably have a number of concerns in common. She’s one of the people I might bounce ideas off.”

Denis and husband, Don Howells, a senior engineer in the county's planning and land use department

Photo by Craig Carlson

That Carabet has achieved such status in a field that is still “old-boy dominated,” as one Journal staffer puts it, is even more unusual. She was one of the first woman business reporters in San Diego, and currently is the highest-ranking one. She is also one of the few woman editors in the area with any real autonomy.

But Carabet downplays her achievements as a woman in business; although lamenting the lack of women in top corporate positions, she thinks all it really takes to get there is personal initiative. Too often, she claims, women fold up their initiative in the face of difficulty and turn to each other for support instead. “When was the last time a covey of women went out and got a job?” she asked recently. “The idea is to get out there and do it; don't sit there and talk about your difficulties with someone who may share your experience.” In her Journal column she once wrote, “Intelligence, motivation, and goals take a person a whole lot farther down the road than all the support in the world.”

Carabet’s views have unquestionably been shaped by her own dynamism, her own will to succeed. For a reporter in San Diego, she has all the standard experience: graduate of the journalism department at San Diego State University; reporter at the San Diego Daily Transcript; staff writer at the San Diego Union. But she rose unusually fast through these ranks, and now beyond: at the age of thirty she has done post-graduate work in economics at Princeton and is editor of a growing publication. Like a branch manager of a bank, Carabet oversees the day-to-day operations and editorial content of the Journal for Cordovan Business Journals of Houston, Texas, which publishes ten similar papers across the United States. “Denise has been upwardly mobile from the day she was born,” says a long-time friend, who adds that Carabet's hard-nosed exterior is just a veneer. “She’s a marshmallow on the inside,” he says.

That may have been true at one time, anyway, and to a certain extent it still is: Carabet can be sympathetic or engaging one moment, steely or devastatingly sarcastic the next. But she herself admits the two sides of her personality have merged over the years into a single person. And in that person steeliness is more than a veneer.

Carabet, who isn’t short on confidence or ego, seems genuinely at a loss to explain how she came to set her career goals so high. “I’ve tried to puzzle it out myself,” she said recently. “There was never any question but that i was going to go to college and then get a job. But there was never any parental pressure other than ‘Do as well as you can, dear.’ ” She chose journalism “because when I was young 1 always read newspapers, and I wanted to do that." Sometimes, though, she will jokingly say that the only female professional role models an eager young middle-class girl ever saw in the 1950s and 1960s were “reporters” Brenda Starr and Lois Lane.

But Starr or Lane might have balked at tackling the annual statements and adjusted indexes a business reporter has to cope with — or might have fallen asleep trying to decipher them. Carabet digs into them with relish. “I’ve always liked numbers,” she told me. “Everyone has a control mechanism that they use to understand things. If I can see something, or feel it, or smell it, or have numbers around it, I can understand it.” An inveterate game player (bridge is her current favorite), she also finds herself attracted to the game-playing aspects of business. She admires businessmen who play the game well, too, and considers herself their peer. A local journalist who has known Carabet for years remembers watching her in action a few years ago at a press conference set up by Sol Price, founder and former president of FedMart. Price had arranged for the press conference to announce that he was considering opening a new discount store in San Diego. “Denise went about it in classic fashion,” the journalist recalls. “I sat there with my notebook on my knees and scribbled down every word Price said. But Denise leaned back, lit a cigarette, sort of flashed her pen around, and said, ‘Sol, it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if it’ll work.’ I mean, it wasn’t a question at all. She didn’t interview him, she talked it over with him.”

Described by many as part reporter, part businesswoman, Carabet has now entered the game herself. As editor of the Journal she has attempted to carve out a readership for her publication by steering away from straight reporting and politics and more toward in-depth profiles and analyses of business and economic trends. Some might call it a soft approach, but Journal reporter Bill Ritter disagrees: “Denise is wholeheartedly pro-business, but she has the skepticism of a true journalist. She’ll always be questioning: that's what keeps the paper alive.”

It will take more than Carabet’s questioning to keep the Journal alive, however. The latest figures show a circulation of only 7800 — not bad for a new publication, but still less than the paper’s competition for local advertising, the Daily Transcript, which claims a circulation of 8250.

A marketing drive this year will combine several mass mailings with some billboards and radio spots, with a goal of expanding the Journal's circulation to 12,000 by the end of the year. But no one associated with Cordovan will say how long their company’s parent organization, the E.W. Scripps Company, plans to sink money into the venture if the paper doesn’t start looking like it will break even. Carabet says that the original target was to be in the black after two or three years, but she adds that the publication will not shut down “after 3.1 years” simply because it is not holding its own. Still, this June the paper will enter its third year of operation, and it will very likely prove to be a crucial one for the Journal.

Denise Carabet was raised in North Canton, Ohio, the eldest of four children. In an upper-middle-class family passionately devoted to games, she learned to play any number of them —canasta, pinochle. Risk — but the most intriguing one was a peculiar variation of the Easter Egg hunt. After retrieving the hidden eggs, the Carabet children would each select one and

“fight” it against the others, hitting the hard-boiled eggs ‘‘point to point or butt to butt, to try to smash them, you know, break the shell,” Carabet told me. The sibling whose eggshell broke first had to eat his defeated egg. “Sometimes you’d get one sort of egg; you know, a good fighter egg.” she said with a laugh. These mysteriously endowed eggs were nearly always triumphant over others. “Didn’t you do this when you were a kid?” Carabet asked, seeing my skeptical look. “I know we didn’t make it up.” ,

Maybe not, but it’s certainly true that Carabet has moved past each challenge in her career with her shell unbroken. After being accepted as an undergraduate at Miami of Ohio, her family’s last-minute move brought her to California, where she enrolled at Cal Western, which was housed on the campus now known as Point Loma College. (The family settled in Palos Verdes, in the Los Angeles area.) Carabet studied journalism at Cal Western for two years before transferring to San Diego State’s journalism department. In her junior year she was arts editor of the Daily Aztec, and “looked and acted the part of an editor, even as a junior in college,” recalls Jane Weisman Applegate, a Union reporter who was a classmate of Carabet’s. Carabet chain-smoked, “always dressed well, and seemed to know exactly where she was going,” Applegate said. “We’re the same age, but she’s always seemed older.”

When Carabet graduated from SDSU in 1973, one of her professors recommended her to Bob Witty, editor of a rapidly growing publication in town, the Daily Transcript. The Transcript had recently changed ownership, and the new' owner, Keith Lister, had charged Witty with the task of turning it from a legal newspaper with no local reporting staff into a full-fledged business and financial publication. Witty interviewed Carabet and found her to be “bright, articulate, and very mature for her age.” She got the job.

“I remember thinking it wasn’t all that strange,” Carabet says now. “I think 1973 was probably a good time to graduate from school and come into the business world as a woman. There wasn’t an awful lot of resistance; things were changing. . . . Every once in awhile you’d get somebody who was a horse’s ass, but with the older people, if someone called you ‘Honey’ once, you just sort of let it go. If he called you ‘Honey’ again, you’d sort of measure it — is this person doing it unconsciously, or should this person be told? If it was particularly offending to me. I’d say, ‘You know, we really don’t know each other well enough for you to be calling me honey, do we? I mean, have we met before?’ They’d usually knock it off.”

It was also at this point in her career that Carabet began to develop her hard-boiled personality, not so much to function as a woman in a man’s world, she says, but because she was relatively young. “I think it scared me to go to a lot of these grown-up things [interviews, corporate annual meetings, and the like]. I mean. hell. I was just out of college. I realized it was going to have to be. ‘Listen, you sucker, you better take me seriously today, because 1 have to write it today for tomorrow’s paper.’ So my new- persona was this person w ho could just deal with anything. Annual meeting? No problem. Party with 500 people? Okay, I can handle that, too. While my other persona was sometimes scared or wondering if I was doing the right thing.” But Carabet recalls her days at the Transcript with nostalgia, too. San Diego had built up a resident population of high-risk speculators and “razzle-dazzle business types,” as Carabet sometimes calls them, and when the nation’s economy took a downward turn in the mid-1970s, a lot of them went out of business. For an aggressive young reporter with investigative leanings, finding stories to cover like the collapse of the U.S. Financial Corporation (the largest bankruptcy in U.S. financial history at that time), or the downfall of C. Arnholt Smith’s corporate empire, was almost too good to be true. “If I could recapture the absolute highs I had when I was at the Transcript ...” she says. “Every day was like a high. My God, we were scooping the Union, the Tribune; I mean, every day. We were like a family.” One of the scoops involved Charlie Legget, who came to San Diego in 1975. Legget had been given a $1.75 million nonnegotiable certificate of deposit by the United States Department of Justice, and was supposed to help uncover securities fraud here by investing in suspicious companies and then reporting back to the government. But he got “caught in his own scam,” as Carabet puts it; using the certificate, he illegally borrowed nearly a million dollars from a Baltimore bank and with it put a down payment on the Earl Gagosian mansion in La Jolla Farms. When Legget defaulted on the balance of the purchase price, the Baltimore bank wound up owning the mansion, and Richard Spaulding, a Transcript reporter who had been following the sale of the house closely, was the first journalist to hear of it. Spaulding and Carabet accompanied the bank’s local representative out to *ee the mansion well before any of the other media in town were on to the story. The mansion “looks like a big Royal Inn.“ Carabet remembers (Gagosian was the president of Royal Inns, Inc.), “with plastic cabinets and a swimming pool with zodiac signs in the tile on the bottom — real tacky. But when Richard and I got there the place was a shambles, literally a shambles. The carpeting in the living room was tom up, and there were rips and tears in the couches. The beds weren’t made. ... It was like somebody had just picked up during the night and fled.” Spaulding, with some help from Carabet, later traced Legget to Rancho Santa Fe through a scrap of paper found in one of the mansion’s bedrooms, and the “government informer” (whose rent on the Rancho Santa Fe house was already several months in arrears) was eventually brought to trial.

By 1976 Carabet had been asked to join the Union’s business section to work under financial editor Don Bauder. She accepted the offer (the job meant higher pay), but insisted on not being required to join the San Diego Newspaper Guild, the union that represents some 900 editorial, advertising, circulation. and other workers at the Union. “Even though labor unions were very necessary at one point in the making of America, I don’t feel that a process like newpaper reporting should be part of a guild or labor union process,” Carabet says, choosing her words carefully. “There are some reporters at the Union who should have been gone years ago. The guild allows them to remain there. It doesn’t necessarily hurt the strong, but it protects the weak. And I didn’t want to have to abide by rules set down by a group I didn’t ask to join.” The Union's management first promised Carabet one of its few allowed guild “exemptions,” but later used it to fill a vacant editorship. “I was pissed,” she remembers. “I was screaming.and jumping up and down, but what could I do? I had already quit my other job.”

Other things at the Union did not go quite the way she would have liked, either.

After just a year on the business section, Carabet suddenly found herself assigned to city hall. For most reporters it’s a prestigious assignment; for Carabet, it was “six months of Purgatory. I hated it. I hated every minute of it. I hated it because my mind isn’t wrapped around politics, basically. My circuit boards are different. I’d sit there with Wiegand (Steve Wiegand, the Tribune’s reporter on the city hall beat at the time] in those little booths they have for reporters in the council chambers, and the voices are piped in. And there’d be a vote on resolution 33-45-6, and Wiegand would say, ‘God, if Floyd goes for this one, that means he owes Gade something. ’ And my mind just did not follow that at all. . . .

“But if I see some company coming out and doing some divestitures, I might start thinking that this is not really part of their game plan, they must be having some trouble, I should talk to their short-term investors. . . . Somehow, numbers are more concrete for me. 1 really like things to be black and white.”

As she said this Carabet was sitting on the carpeted floor of the home she and her husband own in Burlingame, sipping a glass of California chardonnay. She has black-and-white dishes, black-and-white place settings, and once lived in a house where the interior was painted entirely black and white. (In that house, she got into an argument with the landlord when he tried to install a red fire extinguisher in the kitchen.) Many of the chairs and other furnishings in her current house are gray, but she explains that this represents a “major compromise” with her husband, Don Howells, who is a senior engineer in the county's planning and land use department. Carabet often dresses in blacks and whites, too. “I like the starkness of them, the strength of them together,” she said with a shrug. “I’m sure if we went to a psychiatrist he could tell you it says something deep about my psyche.”

Although the city hall assignment was Carabet’s greatest source of discontent while at the Union, there were others, including a difficult (if mutually respectful) relationship with her immediate boss, Don Bauder. Today, as the top two business writers in San Diego, Bauder and Carabet are rivals of sorts, but friendly rivals who seem to have a genuine regard for each other. Many local businessmen say they read both: Bauder with his straightforward but almost frenzied discussions of interest rates or trends in the money supply; Carabet with her more folksy analysis of how those trends will affect homeowners or some other group. “Denise learns very, very quickly,” Bauder commented recently. “That’s her big strength. She has a knowledge of esoteric things in finance that people that young rarely have a grasp of.” Carabet praises Bauder for his brilliance in some areas of economics, and for his loyalty to his writers, too. But she complains that his loyalty can be a shortcoming; while she was at the Union, Bauder wouldn’t discipline any of the writers in his department, even when it was necessary. It became one of several growing frustrations she had at the paper. In general there were both highs and lows, she insists, but “sometimes I felt there were too many chiefs and stars, and not enough Indians. Some of those people who are there for retirement weren’t pulling their load, so that meant people like me had to pull more of a load. That was a very frustrating thing. I felt like I was spinning wheels a lot. You’d get so frustrated you’d say, i’m never walking into this place again until everybody pulls their load, until we can pick up our own wire copy, until they understand what a mortgage is up on the news desk. . . .’ ”

Frustrations such as these, coupled with her city hall assignment, made Carabet decide it was time to get out. In early 1977 she applied for and won a year-long fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study economics at Princeton University. (The Union gave her a leave of absence for the duration of the fellowship.) While at Princeton, Carabet says, her own economic philosophy changed from “conservative" to "closer to the middle of the middle of the road" through exposure to a broad range of economic theories. But unlike many financial writers, including Bauder, Carabet doesn’t tout a personal philosophy in her writing. An independent thinker, she is sometimes identified as a libertarian, but she denies the label. "I’ve read Ayn Rand [who popularized libertarianism through novels such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead] since I could read, but mainly because she was such a wonderful writer. The thing aboiit Ayn Rand is that she really believed in strong women, and for a woman her books are absolutely riveting because you’ve got these strong women characters who really make a difference. They run railroads and build these buildings. ... I mean, it's escapist in a way. But it’s also sort of, ‘Gee whiz, maybe I can run a railroad someday.’

"But I think anyone who really studies economics will take a little bit from a lot of different theories. Libertarianism is just fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t take into account an awful lot of the stuff you have to deal with now. What does a libertarian think about the money supply? What does a libertarian think about budget deficits? That we shouldn't have them. Well, terrific. We all agree on that." And as far as the libertarian dream of a free-enterprise economy in which troublesome governmental regulations don’t exist, Carabet points out that the problems of fraud, environmental damage, and costly litigation in the courts that such a system could, lead to were "never really addressed by Ayn Rand. And there are some scary things that can be done out there. So at times, I think libertarianism is too simplistic. But at times I think more libertarian things could work, especially in the micro sense, at the city government level rather than the state or federal level. Just the way if there was a tiny, tiny little town in the middle of the desert, maybe socialism would work. too. Because everyone would have to depend on one another for their food, water, et cetera. I mean, theoretically it could work. But we *ve evolved to such a complex society that no pure economic philosophy works anymore, simply because we don’t have any pure variables to work with.” Trying to pin Carabet down on what exactly her economic philosophy is, however, is like trying to find the middle of an onion: you know it’s there somewhere, but the onion doesn’t make it very easy to find. As we sat in Carabet’s living room we went back and forth on the question a few times until finally she said, “There are times I wish I could say, ‘This is what I stand for, ’ but it changes. I mean, my God, I reregister to vote every two years, for instance. Whichever party has the most interesting primary is who I register to vote for. This year I’m Republican. Two years ago I was a Democrat. If they’re going to force me to say that I’m a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent or a Libertarian, at least I want to vote in an interesting primary.” I told Carabet I thought that sounded cynical, and for a moment she seemed angry. “I don’t think it sounds cynical. 1 think it sounds absolutely practical,” she responded.

A few moments later she added, “Some people will tell you that I’m to the right of Attila the Hun. But I’m less conservative now than I used to be — incredibly less conservative. Being forced to consider the good points and bad points of broader-view, liberal-type economics at Princeton opened me up a little. I’ve never been a raver about welfare payments, for instance, because I think they do make a difference. And they are very necessary. But the magic words are: in what moderation? At what level? But that's what everyone always argues about, and it’s so simple. Let’s talk about something hard for a change. ... If you and I sit here long enough, with enough wine we could probably solve the world’s problems, right? Not that we could do anything about them.” And with that Carabet selected a cigarette from her pack, lit it, and sat back to wait for the next quesion.

The offices of the San Diego Business Journal are on the second floor of a sleek new building with black glass windows that stands on Camino del Rio North, near the stadium in Mission Valley. In this well-lighted and slightly sterile-looking suite, the Journal takes shape each week, turned out by a staff of twelve that includes three reporters — Jane Clifford, Chris Kraul, and Bill Ritter — in addition to Carabet. There is a camaraderie among the members of the staff that is lacking at most newspapers, large and small, and it stems in large part from Carabet’s conscious effort to re-create the “team” feeling that she once enjoyed at the Transcript. A person who fits easily into a leadership role — “Denise at the helm” is a phrase often used by a long-time friend to describe her — she nevertheless runs an egalitarian ship, sometimes consulting her staff on editorial decisions and even personnel changes.

Every Thursday afternoon Carabet rounds up her coffee cup, blue pens, cigarettes, and Exacto knife from her private office and enters the conference room next door to put the final touches on the latest issue of the Journal before it is sent to the printer. “This is the final slapping-together day,” she tells me one Thursday as she leaves her office. “Once I look through these final flats, the paper’s over." (The Journal is printed on Friday and is out on newstands and street boxes by Sunday in order to catch the eye of business people on their way to work Monday morning.) Carabet still writes a weekly column for the Journal, but since reporter Jane Clifford joined the paper’s staff last November, Carabet herself has done less writing and more of the day-to-day business of an editor. Staffer Bill Ritter once remarked, “Deep down I think Denise really misses that [reporting], but she’s also driven by an upward mobility that says she should like what she’s doing because she's becoming a manager. She rationalizes it by thinking it’s good for her.’’ But Ritter’s assessment is belied by Carabet’s comment as she sits down at a long wooden table in the conference room and begins looking through the flats one by one: “The beauty of this job is that I’m business reporting, which is what I know how to do, and I’m running sort of a little business at the same time.”

Carabet didn’t go looking for a job as editor of a weekly publication, but in a way it seems inevitable that she landed one. When she first returned to the Union from Princeton in mid-1978, she resumed working under Bauder on the business section. But the old frustrations continued, and there were new ones, too. Carabet suggested a downtown bureau to cover the burgeoning business scene in the center city, with herself as bureau chief. The suggestion was turned down. And also, she points out, “Where was I going to go at the Union? Bauder wasn’t going anywhere.” When Michael Weingart from Cordovan met her for breakfast one morning in late 1979 and told her of his firm's plan to set up a new weekly business paper in San Diego, Carabet was honest with him: she told him it was a dumb idea. The Union and the Transcript had local business news covered like a blanket, she said. But when Weingart met her again a few months later and asked her to be editor of the new publication, she reconsidered. “They showed me what they were doing in other cities, and I thought, why not try it? I figured if 1 could get some people as energetic as I wanted them to be. it might work. To tell you the truth, it was sort of a selfish idea. It was a little bit of, ‘What could I do if I were running the show?’ Because I’d been around this community writing business for nine years. ...”

Sipping her coffee through a straw (a long-time habit), Carabet slans each page of the Journal carefully. The fiats have been proofed twice already, she explains, and she is only looking over “sensitive issues” and assorted small details. Outside the conference room, where the San Diego River used to run, is a parking lot, still wet in places from heavy rains the day before. Above it the late afternoon sky is beginning to grow dark. In the nine years Carabet has been a journalist here the city has changed, and so has the game of business. In the early and mid-1970s, she remembers, San Diego’s business scene was “wild and woolly”; the area had become a virtual haven for unscrupulous investors and businessmen. Although no one has ever come up with a satisfactory explanation of why this was, it seems to have been caused in part by the relatively affluent group of senior citizens here, who, along with retired military personnel, have always been the favored targets of "razzle-dazzle business types” who promise high returns on investments in a hurry. “You find them a lot in entrepreneurial ventures — anything that’s highly leveraged” (a term for a company that uses a high percentage of investors’ funds and almost none of its own), Carabet says. She recalls one flashy entrepreneur named Richard Horwath, who set up a gold and silver exchange in Mission Valley in the mid ’70s that was typical of the era. “He told his investors, ‘You want to buy gold bars, silver bars, fine; buy them from us and we’ll just keep them here in our vaults for you so they’re safe. ’ And one day the investors went to look at their gold and silver bars (there weren’t any), and the guy was outta there.’’ (Horwath was later indicted and successfully prosecuted for his crimes.)

A few of these dubious types have drifted back to San Diego recently, Carabet notes, adding that she won’t reveal names because she intends to keep an eye on them. But for the most part the climate here has changed, stirred up in a major way by the fall of C. Arnholt Smith. Smith, the former Mr. San Diego who is said to have once painted the curb in front of his corporate offices red so it would be free of cars when he wanted to park there, was “among the movingest and shakingest people around. His fall rocked the foundation of San Diego, ’’ and he scared a lot of people into realizing that such things could happen here, Carabet says, with a little smile. Since then, many people have taken a more careful attitude toward investments.

Today there are fewer corporate scams here, and no one as powerful as Smith in his heyday, according to Carabet. With her nine years of connections in the corporate world, she is in a good position to assess both the strength and the behind-the-scenes plans of some of the most influential businessmen and politicians in the city. (In San Diego in particular, business and politics go together like cookies and milk.) But Carabet generally avoids discussing such machinations in the Journal. “This whole paper stays away from politics for the most part,” she says. “The politics as they affect, say, the builders, or the Gaslamp people, sure — that gets covered. But it’s more issue-oriented than politician-oriented. Everyone else is out there knocking themselves out doing politics; what could I do that would be much different? Besides, if I started letting loose on politicians. . . .’’She shakes her head.

But while the Journal occasionally covers controversial issues (the convention center and the peripheral canal were both discussed extensively in recent articles), the coverage tends to focus on how those issues would adversely affect business rather than the public. And rarely does the paper take a critical stance on topics that could adversely affect local industry, such as the area’s rapid growth rate or deficits in the proposed national budget caused by runaway defense spending. Like a sports section that is devoured by hungry sports fans, the Journal seems destined for the desks of business connoisseurs, sitting in their carpeted, well-lighted offices. This has lead some critics to charge that the Journal by its very nature can’t be critical of business or it would lose both its readership and its contacts. But Carabet does not agree. Unlike most sports writers, she says, she covers a number of different “teams” (businesses), which gives her the latitude to be more critical. Last December, for instance, Carabet wrote that the locally based Wickes Companies were undergoing a financial pinch that was not alluded to in the company’s public statements, and more recently, a Journal article by Bill Ritter outlined the difficulties of Playboy Club franchise owner Carroll Davis, who had defaulted on a third trust deed on his Rancho Santa Fe house and was advertising for partners in his club in violation of state regulations.

Bob Witty, former editor of the Transcript (and now deputy editor of the Evening Tribune) explains that “not all segments of business get along with each other. Business is misunderstood in that sense. They stand together on certain laws and issues that affect business. . . . But if some guy who runs his business here is a crook, and a paper writes that he’s a crook, other businessmen aren’t going to resent that.” As for being critical of business in general. Witty adds, “Someone who felt that way probably wouldn’t go to work for a business publication” in the first place.

As Carabet has been looking over the flats she has found something she doesn’t like. After pondering for a moment she wonders aloud, “Is vis-a-vis spelled with hyphens?” The correct answer, as usual, comes not from anyone present but from the dictionary. In answer to my question, Carabet explains that the Journal's readership consists mostly of heads of companies, self-employed entrepreneurs, and, increasingly, midlevel managers. “Most people who read us go to a tax accountant or have assets that are going to have to be depreciated,” she says. “That’s about as consumer oriented as we get. But I like to think we don’t write above people’s heads; we do a lot of This is what this means’ type stories.” The Journal tries to offer a different format from either the Union or the Transcript, she continues, by doing more “how-to” articles (how to select and manage computer systems. or how to get involved in direct-mail advertising are recent examples), and reflective pieces which analyze business trends and decisions rather than simply reporting them as they occur.

So far, Carabet's editorial stance seems to be working. When asked recently, several heads of local companies said they like the Journal's feature articles, which they describe as “think pieces “ that cannot be found in the Union or the Transcript. Along with the Journal's profiles and ongoing coverage of what local businesses — and businessmen — are up to, the Journal seems to have found a niche of sorts in local business reporting. “The Union seems to spend more time at the national level,” sums up the Bank of Commerce’s Peter Davis. “Their coverage of the local scene hasn't been as in-depth since Denise left. And the Daily Transcript is more of a legal paper. It has a lot of good reference material, but it seems to have gone through a major change. It was more interesting formerly than it is today; their new reporters don’t seem to have the contacts that the old ones did.

But while local businessmen seem to like the Journal, most of them haven’t seen fit to advertise in it. Like nearly all publications, the Journal relies on advertising to provide the main source of rev* enue, and to date the paper’s relatively high advertising rates ($970 for a full page), coupled with its newness and limited circulation, has kept many potential advertisers away. “Since the first of the year, the advertising has been up and down like a yo-yo,” Carabet confides as she pores over the flats. “Last week we had three ads in the whole paper. That was it — terrific. ” In other weeks the advertising has totaled as much as four full pages, she says, but even this is well short of the roughly six pages Carabet says the paper would need to break c; even (the Journal’s normal size is 't; twenty-four pages). Although Carabet insists that the Journal doesn’t compete with the Transcript from an editorial standpoint (“They’re different animals,” she says), the two publications’ advertising bases clearly overlap, and there are those who say the market here is too slim to support both. Don Bauder claims the Transcript's function as a legal newspaper gives it something of a 4 ’natural monopoly ” — a built-in audience of lawyers and real estate people who comb the paper’s pages for notices which simply aren’t published anywhere else.

He says that even if the Transcript were to change direction and leave local business and financial coverage to the Journal. Carabet and her staff would still be up against the problem of San Diego’s diverse business community. “There’s an unusual mix of companies here — high technology industries, real estate, tourist — and they aren’t necessarily interested in reading about each other,” Bauder said not long ago. “That makes it a difficult audience to reach, and Denise doesn’t have that ‘natural monopoly’ to fall back on.” Michael Weingart, associate publisher of Cordovan Business Journals, seemed to agree with Bauder when he said in a recent telephone interview that “the market in San Diego is not as independent, as defined as in L.A.” (Cordovan publishes business journals in ten cities: Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, Phoenix, Seattle. San Francisco, and Los Angeles in addition to San Diego. Only the older Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth publications are consistent moneymakers.) Weingart also pointed out that San Diego “is one of the smaller markets of the areas we’re in, which would be significant in terms of the number of people we’re addressing our publication to.” But he denied that the local Journal was under any pressure to break even in the near future or face a shutdown. “We think the people are doing a good job; we’d just like to see better numbers,” he said.

Neither Weingart nor Carabet will say how much money the San Diego Business Journal lost last year; Carabet comments only that Cordovan seems to be slowly realizing that San Diego is a different market from Houston or Dallas/Fort Worth and will require a different strategy if the Journal here is to succeed. Part of that strategy involves more articles aimed at entrepreneurs and midlevel management rather than corporate heads; San Diego simply does not have the number of corporate headquarters that many larger cities have. Carabet also periodically devotes space to extensive summaries of various local industries such as tourism or building in an effort to identify and attract specific kinds of advertising for certain issues of the paper. “It would be nice if by the end of 1982 we could be making a profit,” she says absent-mindedly while scanning the flats, cigarette in hand. “That’s the name of the game.” A moment later, though, Carabet brings up the subject of the Journal's circulation of 7800 with pride, noting that in the beginning, “quite simply, it was zero. And it takes a little longer for people to pick up a new publication. When I was at the Daily Transcript we had to work really hard at that [increasing circulation], and we practically had to grab people on the street, put the paper in their hands and say, ‘Okay, sucker, “read this, it’s good.' ”

Suddenly Carabet utters, “Uh-oh,” and picks up her knife. With it she straightens a small line that had somehow been pasted onto the flat slightly crooked. Denise at the helm. In the twenty-one months she has been editor of the Journal, Bauder has tried several times to talk Carabet into returning to the Union. She was also offered the position of financial editor of the Evening Tribune recently, but she turned it down. While she was at Princeton the Wall Street Journal contacted, her, too, but as she tells me now, “For the openings they had, I wasn’t interested.” If the Wall Street Journal were to approach her again, she doesn't know what she would say. “Before the Business Journal came along, yes, definitely I was thinking about going to the Wall Street Journal. Now, I don’t know. I don’t know what the next step is. It goes through your mind.”

Carabet finishes looking at the last flat and suddenly announces, “Okay, it’s done.’’This issue of the Journal is over. Ritter and the few other staff members still present disappear almost immediately, except for William Goss, who will deliver the flats to the printer along with a few instructions. Carabet stands up; she looks tired. The sky outside looks black, but it is really a deep, deep shade of blue.

Sometimes you can’t help feeling it really doesn’t matter for Carabet whether the Journal flies or fails. It would just mean that for her, the game would start anew. And the next time around she’d play it a little differently and probably win; she’s a good fighter egg.