Anderson Valley Advertiser

Last updated
Anderson Valley Advertiser
Type Weekly newspaper
Format Broadsheet
Owner(s)Independent
Publisher Bruce Anderson
EditorBruce Anderson
Founded1955
Headquarters Boonville, CA 95415
United States
Website theava.com

The Anderson Valley Advertiser is a small weekly tabloid published in Anderson Valley, California. It was founded in 1955 as a local, community-based paper. The AVA's masthead features mottoes borrowed from the French Revolution and the Industrial Workers of the World:

Various quotations are distributed throughout every issue of the paper. Examples include:

Contributors include:

Bruce Anderson has owned and edited the Anderson Valley Advertiser since January 1984. He left the AVA, as the paper is known, in 2004 for Oregon where he tried to start another weekly. It failed and Anderson bought the AVA back in July 2007. The paper enjoys a modest national circulation. Its masthead bills it as "America's last newspaper." The paper is unique in that it is based in the rural community of Boonville, Mendocino County, California, but features much leftwing opinion wrapped around local sports, school board reports, profiles of local characters, and impressively detailed stories on local controversies. Anderson describes himself as "a socialist with strong, nay overwhelming, anarchist instincts."

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Wanda Tinasky, ostensibly a bag lady living under a bridge in the Mendocino County area of Northern California, was the pseudonymous author of a series of playful, comic, and erudite letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and the Anderson Valley Advertiser between 1983 and 1988. These letters were later collected and published as The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. In them, Tinasky weighs in on a variety of topics—most notably local artists, writers, poets, and politicians—with an irreverent wit and literate polish. The harshness of the attacks was deemed excessive by the Commentary early on, and, as a result, most of the remaining letters appeared in the AVA. At the time, the identity of Tinasky was completely unknown, and was subject to much local speculation. Tinasky was thought by many to be novelist Thomas Pynchon until it was demonstrated that Tinasky was likely an obscure Beat Generation poet named Tom Hawkins.

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Bruce Anderson is the publisher and editor of the Northern California weekly newspaper, Anderson Valley Advertiser (AVA), which he purchased in 1984 for a sum of $20,000. The New York Times described the AVA as "the country's most idiosyncratic and contentious weeklies." Anderson is known for publishing some of the most interesting, well-researched journalism in Northern California.