2005 Annual Report - Alternative Media Outlook

In 2004, after two years of decline, circulation of alternative weeklies gained momentum. According to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), a trade organization, circulation rose to 7.5 million, up from 7.3 million in 2003, an increase of about 3%. The audience is still down from the all-time high of nearly 8 million in 2001, but on the current track, it may get back there soon.¹ Most in the industry attributed the drop to the recession, which dried up advertising money and, in turn, led to the closing of some weeklies in competitive markets.²

Besides the recession and the closing of a few papers, some reasons for the declines in circulation were a slide in both sales and traffic in record stores, where most weeklies are distributed; the replacement of locally owned stores with chains that are less likely to allow free publications to distribute; a proliferation in the number of free-circulation publications in general (e.g., shoppers, real estate guides, auto traders), which has led to restrictive news-rack ordinances in many cities and markedly increased the competition for retail distribution space; and the growth of alt-weekly Web sites, which allow a portion of the papers' audience (especially those who read solely for the listings or classifieds) to get the content without picking up the papers.

Growth in Alternative News Weeklies

Association of Alternative Newsweelies Member Publications, 1989 - 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Association of Alternative Newsweeklies unpublished data

Over time the readership of these publications has changed, growing slightly grayer and wealthier along with the overall American population.

• The median age of alternative-weekly readers increased from 38.4 in 1997 to 40.0 in 2003.³

• The average household income of readers increased from $50,583 in 1995 to $64,120 in 2003.⁴

Alternative Weekly Readership by Age Group

1995 - 2004

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, unpublished data

*The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies did not gather data in 2000

Readership among all groups grew over the period examined in the chart above, but older audiences grew as a percentage of the readership.⁵ Consider, for example, how the oldest age group has increased as a percentage of the papers' total readership - an 8% rise in readers 50 and older since 1995 - while the percentage of readers in other age groups is slowly declining.⁶

The readership has also become more family-oriented. A higher percentage was married in 2003 than in 1992-1994 (a period for which the organization aggregated data) - 46.9% in 2003 compared to 36.4% in 1992-94. The number of readers with children at home grew even more sharply, from 28.4% in 1992-94 to 40% in 2003.⁷

What's more, those trends are the opposite of what the nation at large is experiencing. For that same period, 1992 to 2003, nationwide Census figures show the percentage of married households falling from 55% to 51%.⁸ The percentage of families with children under 18 at home declined from 49% to 48%.⁹

What accounts for the differences between the demographics for alternative weekly readers and those for the general population? One possibility is that the same issues that appeared to skew polling in the last presidential election are at play. The demographic data are gathered by interviews that require respondents to spend more than half an hour on the phone, which may tend to capture more married-with-children respondents; young people are less likely to be home or to take the time for the survey. Such polls also don't include people who rely on cell phones for communication and may not even have land-line phones in their homes. Again, such people tend to be younger. Still, there seems to be little question that alternative weekly readers are more likely to be married with children as they age.

The demographic shifts suggest that alternative weeklies are growing into a more serious, or at least a more mature, news source. That's not to say the best-known and most respected among the weeklies (The Village Voice in New York, Chicago Reader) only recently started taking their commitment to news seriously. They have considered themselves serious news organizations for years. But the alternative weeklies are increasingly perceived as serious news organizations by the mainstream media as their readership grows.¹⁰

The shifts in demographics and in perceptions may also have to do with new publications' joining the field and joining AAN. In 1995, the organization included 52 publications in 46 markets. By 2003 it had 108 weeklies in 72 markets.¹¹