2005 Annual Report - Alternative Media Outlook

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."

When it comes to content, Karpel says, the new corporate weeklies tend to avoid delving into local politics or contentious arts issues that the alternative papers cover. "These papers are limited by the corporate culture of the companies that own them," he says. "They try not to offend."

Indeed, some believe that the edginess that is so characteristic of the alternative weeklies, the willingness to challenge community assumptions and norms, is what is threatened in the longer run. (And some weekly-watchers say the boldness has already waned since ownership has grown more "corporate.")

With the help of AAN, the Project for Excellence in Journalism solicited reactions to the new competition from a group of alternative-weekly editors around the country. Their words, quoted below at some length, are revealing.

There is some concern over the possibility of losing ad dollars to their new competitors, but there is also a disdain for what the editors consider "faux weeklies" and the kind of journalism the older alternative press believes these new challengers represent. What we hear in the editors' words is a clash of cultures, between a publishing world grounded in longer pieces, idiosyncratic writers, and literary voice in journalism, and what the editors consider an anti-literary, focus-group driven big-business competition.

Vince O'Hearn, publisher of the Isthmus in Madison, Wisconsin:
" Our market has been host to a faux-alt startup titled Core Weekly published by Capital Newspapers Inc.) for the last two months. It has not
gained traction in the marketplace so far. They are putting out 48 pages a week with about 5 pages of display, which we have determined was either given free or for a very low price, and six or seven pages of classified, all of which are lifted from the daily product. They are causing us not a whiff of problem to date, though their sniffing around our advertisers is unsettling. Very few, or maybe none, are interested in their blandishments. … Incidentally, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is rolling out their faux-alt (they call it an alternative) this week or next."

Chuck Strouse, editor of New Times Broward-Palm Beach in Fort Lauderdale:
"Our Tribune Company-owned competition, CityLink, has gone through a rather radical transformation - replacing news with shorter, youth, youth, youth-driven stories. Pretty much all attempts at writing about politics or afflicting the comfortable or serious journalism or substance - which was something they once attempted - is gone. As are people over 25, serious art criticism, folk music, classical music, and anything of more sophisticated culture. The paper was here long before we were - but now looks more like a commuter daily for dummies …"

Alison True, editor of Chicago Reader:
"Here's one effect [of the arrival of the new competition]: an irritating tendency on the part of other media to erroneously compare the Reader to local youth dailies. After our recent long-overdue redesign, a poster to an online discussion accused us of "getting all Tribune on our ass. Bigger font, more color, big pretty pictures? C'mon!" And a recent report on arts coverage in dailies, put out by the NAJP [National Arts Journalism Program] at Columbia, said youth-oriented dailies put out by Gannett and Tribune Co. "mimic" local weeklies. I don't know about other cities, but they don't do that here. We run magazine-style long and short features, essayistic arts reviews, and exhaustively complete entertainment listings. We compete with the dailies for ads and for readers' time, but there's little overlap in content."