2005 Annual Report - Alternative Media Outlook

In addition to battling among themselves, alternative weeklies are tying to ward off competition from two different fronts. First is the arrival of free dailies, small ad-driven tabloids given out by daily newspapers primarily to mass-transit commuters. At the same time they are seeing the rise of what they call "faux alternatives," weekly ad-driven tabs started by the towns' dominant daily newspapers, aimed at competing with the alternative weeklies directly.

Whether the new rivals prove to be long-term competition remains to be seen. Both can work off content from their mainstream publications. The free dailies also have the money to station people at mass-transit nodes where riders are looking for something to read on their way to work or around town. These papers can guarantee a lot of eyes.

Content

The real concern with the new competitors, however, is their central mission.

The free daily newspapers are not expected to thrive in and of themselves. Rather, they try to siphon off some of the available advertising dollars and steer readers to the parent publications, the metropolitan dailies that created them. The dailies will do anything they can to reach younger readers, who seem to be shunning daily newspapers.²⁰

The metropolitan papers' free dailies usually limit their content to wire service copy. They are loath to offer free the same content they would like readers to pay for. Most of the free dailies don't even have a reporting staff as such.

The weeklies launched by large companies have a different approach. They want to take on the alternative weeklies more directly in terms of editorial packaging and are looking to attract younger audiences with heavy emphasis on entertainment coverage. There have been some significant startups in recent years. Tribune has attempted to climb into the free-weeklies market in Florida. Gannett has launched free weeklies in small and medium-sized cities around the country - Boise, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, Lansing, Mich., Rochester, N.Y., Greenville, S.C. - in hopes of grabbing some audience that would normally gravitate to the alternative weeklies. Times Publishing Company, which publishes the St. Petersburg Times, started tbt* in the Tampa Bay area. Cox has entered the game with AccessAtlanta. And for several years now Knight Ridder has been publishing Street Miami.²¹

Among all of these companies, Tribune has experimented the most with the new youth-oriented formats. In Chicago, of course, it has RedEye, a paid-circulation daily (although many copies are given away) with content that is more like what one might see in a big-company weekly than a commuter daily. Tribune also owns a majority interest in amNewYork, a commuter daily. In Broward County, Fla., its Sun-Sentinel has been publishing a weekly called City Link (previously called XS) for years. And several years ago, Tribune acquired the Advocate/Weekly chain of four alternative papers in New England.

But the traditional alternative weeklies maintain that such efforts fall short of what they offer, notably local political and arts coverage. "They don't concern our members in terms of coverage," says Richard Karpel of AAN. "But they concern our members as businesses."

There is undoubtedly some truth to those critiques of the new competition, but there are larger long-term content questions ahead for the alternative weeklies as well. The weeklies grew out of the New Journalism movement, which meant many were formed around long stories and distinctive writing voices. The Village Voice came of late-1950s and early-1960s New York and the thinking of people like Norman Mailer, one of its co-founders. That period of evolution continued for years. The Chicago Reader, for instance, didn't appear until 1971. The template of those papers was and remains stories like those that appeared in the early days of Rolling Stone, boundary-pushing stories about things that didn't get coverage elsewhere.

Now the question is whether that format, which helped the papers increase circulation and ad revenues, will be as popular with the next generation of readers. As we show in the audience section of this chapter, the readers of the weeklies are growing richer and becoming more family-oriented, but they are also growing older.

The model the new (and what critics call "faux") alternative weeklies are using does not follow the long-form literary style of "new journalism." The model is more along the lines of the quintessential magazine of the 1990s, "Entertainment Weekly" - short story-lets designed for quick reading. And indeed some of the old-line alternative weeklies are experimenting with this model of journalism. "We live in a TV- and Web-dominated world, where pictures increasingly trump words, and attention spans grow shorter and more fractured," writes Richard Karpel of AAN. "And there is a widespread recognition in our industry that we need to find new ways to communicate with readers if we expect them to continue to pick us up. The challenge for us is how to do that while maintaining our core mission."

It's not yet clear how much of an impact the new challenges will have on alternative weeklies over the long haul. Yet more is at stake culturally and journalistically in this dispute than which free-circulation tabloid paper prevails. The two kinds of papers offer different things to their communities. If the older alternative weeklies pass away, what replaces them as advertising vehicles will not, by any means, be duplicating what they are trying to do in terms of the politics, culture and values of the cities in which they appear. The sense of "alternative" that means offering a different perspective in the community will, to a significant extent, be gone.

For the moment, such a drastic shift is not measurable in the numbers, and apparently is not occurring. Whether that situation changes will be an important barometer measuring urban culture.