The Los Angeles Times slammed the famous Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, Calif., today with an article headlined, “Tough times hurting a flea market.” In the article, staff reporter Roger Vincent observed that “There were thousands of shoppers, but not enough of them were spending, several merchants said.” Vincent also quoted two vendors who said that while some products are selling poorly, other products are selling well. And he found one vendor who said that business was just plain bad.
That anecdotal evidence — personal reporting and three vendors quoted from a market of 2,400 sellers — is what the writer offers to explain the negative headline. And although he interviewed Dennis Dodson, chief operating officer of R.G. Canning Attractions, the owner of the Rose Bowl Flea Market, Vincent did not include the strong quotes that Dodson also offered FleaMarketZone.com today in a follow-up interview.
“Our attendance is fine,” Dodson tells FleaMarketZone.com. “Our vendors are sold out. We’re as sold out as we’ve ever been, in all of our markets. Our Ventura market, our San Bernardino market, our Beaumont market, our Rose Bowl market — all our markets are doing fine. Business is good. We’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Dodson has his own explanation for the tone of the L.A. Times article. “The guy who talked to me, his name is Roger Vincent, he’s a staff writer for the LA Times. I talked to him yesterday, and I gave him some figures. I told him that flea markets traditionally do well in a down economy. He just wanted a negative article.”
Contacted by FleaMarketZone.com, Vincent said the L.A. Times usually does not let its reporters comment on stories, but he was kind enough to help arrange permission to be quoted on the record.
Vincent, a 25-year newspaper veteran who normally covers commercial real estate, said he was covering the business news desk as part of Sunday rotation, so that no one reporter has to always work on Sunday. “I ended up at the flea market because we rotate the weekly Sunday duty, and I pulled it Sunday. The section editor decided that whoever worked that Sunday was going to go out and take a look at the flea market. So I was the one who got sent,” he explains.
He said that although he personally is not an expert on the business of flea markets, he does know that they are an important part of the economy. “I’m not very experienced at flea markets,” he says. “The flea market is a big deal around here. It’s pretty damn big.”
Vincent explains that his news article was based on his anecdotal interviews. “This is anecdotal, which makes it tougher for what we’re trying to accomplish. I talked with a lot of vendors. Most of them said that it’s been better, and it’s not as good as it could be, and they’re disappointed,” he says. “I don’t know, since I don’t do this all the time, whether that’s something they would routinely say, that they are perpetually disappointed because they are hoping for more. But I got the impression that they were sincere.”
He mentioned, as he did in the article, that he was speaking primarily of luxuries like art and holiday decorations, not necessities. “If you’re selling the kinds of products that don’t put food on the table, or that immediately make your life better, you’re going to have a harder time selling it than if you are selling something pragmatic. That was my impression.”
And Vincent added that he did not include many quotes from Dennis Dodson because he was focused on vendors and shoppers, and didn’t have room for more. “I had to fill 16 inches,” he says, referring to the traditional way that newspapers measure the length of an article, “and what I was going after was mostly the people there as opposed to the management.”
He says that his reporting did not include enough information to actually prove a point: “These are impressions that I got on one day of talking to random people, and I couldn’t pretend that my sampling of hundreds of vendors that they’ve got there is a representative sample, enough to prove a point. The group that I talked to, that’s what they told me. I’m just reporting the impressions I got from them, that they were disappointed in the number of things they were selling. But obviously, the merchants keep coming. The place didn’t have an empty stall, as far as I could tell, so it’s got to be working somewhat for them.”
Responding to Dodson’s accusation of bias, Vincent responds, “I’m sorry he feels that way. I kind of understand where he’s going with that. But I didn’t start off with any preconceived notions of what I was going to find. I was trying to see if they were Christmas shopping yet. And that’s what I heard.”