Christopher W Riordan

The BEAST is BACK! Kinda.

The BEAST is back! Kinda.

The Buffalo BEAST, founded by Matt Taibbi, was a controversial and often brutal biweekly political satire newspaper that rose to national prominence and attention before eventually succumbing to the death of print of media and slowly withering away as a web-only publication.

I was finishing up a journalism degree and working on the staff of The Artvoice, an arts and entertainment weekly with a stranglehold on local alternative media, when Taibbi moved to Buffalo with a plan to launch an American version of The eXile – the chaotic and brilliant ex-pat newspaper he and Mark Ames had established in Moscow

The BEAST quickly waged a public war upon The Artvoice and its publisher Jamie Moses, a conflict that climaxed with Moses threatening Taibbi with a pool stick and allegedly stalking him outside of his home. The two papers were as different as night and day, and there was really no reason for The BEAST to antagonize The Artvoice other than to provide humorous fodder for readers – but it was clear which of the two were more aligned with my own asshole nature.

I soon quit the Artvoice and started submitting content to The BEAST. It wasn’t long until Taibbi realized there was no profitable future for the rag and took a job with the New York Press.

I was contacted by a delivery man for the paper one day and asked if I could quickly come up with some material because, as he put it, Taibbi had quit and they had no one to write the paper they were intent on delivering. I sent over some stuff I had published in other outlets and a couple quick little pieces, amused by the efforts of this monster trying to continue on without a head.

For several issues there was a weird scramble among the staff to establish a hierarchy of some sorts and carry the banner. Somehow, I ended up as the editor. I would only last 5 issues before having a mental breakdown and abandoning ship, with the paper again in the odd position of hiring a boss. The art director tapped Al Uthman, the son of Saddam Hussein’s dentist, as the new editor. He, along with Ian Murphy, did a hell of a job for several years putting out an impressive monthly magazine.

By taking a national focus, it was hard to keep local advertisers. An ill-advised idea to start charing two dollars for what had initially been a free paper was another blow to The BEAST. No one wants to pay for something they got for free last month. The print version was scrapped and it became a web-only publication. And since it was primarily Uthman and Murphy writing everything, it wasn’t very far removed from a blog.

Which is what this is. The actual Buffalo BEAST stopped in, I believe, 2009. That was the last time it existed as a printed version. Whatever happened after that was pretty much a blog called The BEAST. I am not trying to diminish the work of anyone who was involved during that era – I am explaining that this current venture is basically picking up at that sad, isolated “basically a blog” stage of the game.

And why? Why am I digging up the skeleton of some old newspaper and haunting the internet with it? Because I have a book called The American BEAST coming out later this year and want to promote it. It’s a mix of new crap and reprinted material from my time with The BEAST and it will be available through this website and Amazon sometime this summer.