2005 Annual Report - Alternative Media Outlook

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.