April 13, 1994

Losing Our Religion

As Mainstream newspapers die or spin their wheels, alternative weeklies have cashed in. But what’s left of their independent spirit – beyond low-paying jobs and sex ads?

The unceremonious firing of LA Weekly Editor Kit Rachlis last summer sent ripples of anxiety through the rest of North America’s alternative press. Why had the editor been canned after creating one of the country’s best journals of ideas, an original alternative rag that stood out among a monotonous pack of think-alike papers?

Beyond the mutual, ego-driven antipathy between himself and Publisher Michael Sigman, Rachlis says that Sigman disagreed with Rachlis' vision of a writers’ paper that was "too intellectual and too serious" for Sigman’s taste. As a testament to Rachlis’ conception of the paper – which ranged from impressionistic street reporting on the 1992 LA riots to long, offbeat ruminations on multiculturalism or the meaning of God – five of the paper’s top writers walked out in protest when he was fired.

Did Rachlis’ four-year tenure perish, the weekly press began to wonder, because he was too alternative at a time when the dividing line between the alternative and mainstream papers is becoming increasingly blurred? The new editor, Sue Horton, arrived at the paper’s Hollywood offices in mid-March with strong mainstream media credentials – she is a USC journalism professor with a background in investigative reporting – and a stated aim to redirect the paper’s writerly, subjective tone.

Horton says a good alternative paper should serve the muckraking, watchdog role that a classic mainstream daily newspaper is supposed to fulfill, but frequently doesn't. "The function of an alternative paper is to be constantly nipping at the heels of the local bureaucracy and culture," says Horton. "I think that means more hard-edged news as opposed to analysis and opinion. The alternative press needs to have and express an opinion – and I believe it should do it on the opinion page and have the news separate."

The brouhaha at the West Coast’s top alternative weekly was followed by a slightly different struggle at the industry’s flagship paper on the East Coast – New York’s venerable Village Voice. In February, Voice editor Jonathan Larsen announced his resignation, citing too much stress and internal factionalism. The additional drop in ad revenue and circulation at the Voice has heightened a heated debate within the paper over its editorial direction. There are divergent opinions about where the Voice is headed, but some insiders fear the publisher is looking to move the paper uptown by creating a softer, more digestible alternative weekly.

James Ledbetter, the media critic at the Voice, sees the turmoil there and at LA Weekly as part of a larger struggle for the soul of the alternative press as it reaches middle age. The success of the alternative press nationwide – the number of papers belonging to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) has mushroomed from 30 in 1978 to 87 in 1994 – has thrown the once-prized concept of "alternative" into limbo. Steve Buel, editor of San Jose’s Metro, who served as interim editor at LA Weekly after Rachlis’ firing, sees the "vague notion of alternativeness" these papers all share as too often being an outdated relic of the counterculture. "I am personally not wild about the word Alternative, particularly with a capital ‘A,’" he says. "It suggests a predictable left-wing critique of the established power structures."

To others, however, "alternative" is a vital, if embattled, label of resistance to the bland mainstreaming of the weekly press. "In what gets called the 'alternative press' I definitely see a homogenization and standardization and depoliticized content," says Ledbetter. "These papers are clearly struggling with how to define themselves."

The struggle dates back to the age of Watergate, a time of growing public skepticism of big institutions, including daily newspapers. The dailies’ loss of hunger for political scandal and lack of interest in the experience of marginalized ethnic and social groups spawned both alternative papers and their predecessors, the underground papers of the anti-war movement. Unlike the scrappy underground rags, which positioned themselves as the shrill if often sloppy mouthpieces of hippy politics, the alties were much more about journalism than revolt. "The people who started the alternative papers didn't want to be revolutionary," says Abe Peck, a journalism professor at Northwestern University and author of Uncovering the Sixties: the Life and Times of the Underground Press. "It was OK for them to own more than one pair of jeans."

As such, the alties probably better built for longevity. In the Bay Area, that meant that the Bay Guardian slowly superceded the counterculture's Berkeley Barb. "The people at the Guardian weren't out in Berkeley turning over police cars," says Peck. "They were trying to sue the power company." These were men – and they were men, for the most part, the kind who wore rumpled khaki pants and oxford shirts without ties – who believed that the enduring problems in America could be resolved through established channels if those channels were properly monitored and reformed.

Perhaps the most revolutionary notion the alternative press introduced into journalism was the idea of point of view – that by introducing personality into reporting and pointing out the cozy relationship between the rubric of objectivity and the power structures that underlie it, one could better show the readers the truth beneath the story. As they evolved, the papers came upon a business formula that would allow them to challenge the establishment notions of power and culture without having to please the big, sensitive advertisers. The weeklies instead cultivated a local, small advertiser base by offering low ad rates and a young, active demographic – people who would be prone to buying futons, frequenting nightclubs, and picking up a free newspaper for its entertainment listings, editorial irreverence and personal ads. In essence, the alternatives created a little welfare state – the entertainment section in the back of the book subsidized the profit-averse editorial endeavors in the front of the book.

And it worked, if the increased revenues of Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) papers – 150 percent in the last six years – are any indication. Circulation has also grown: from less than a million in 1978 to 5.2 million in 1994. In an era when dailies are downsizing and conglomerating and generally spinning in circles, the alternatives are one of the few healthy aspects of the national newspaper industry.

But has the alties’ success become a commercial mother lode that’s corrupting their original mission? Increasingly, readers are finding commercially driven stories slapped on the covers: More than a few papers had Valentine’s Day cover stories this year and many will certainly be playing up Christmas as well. And those annual "Best Of" issues (SF Weekly has recently decided to publish one as well, under the title "Super SF") are consistently the thickest papers of the year (i.e. they generate the most ad revenue). Although they no doubt provide a service to readers, they are, more pointedly, a service to advertisers – a very mainstream notion.

Embattled dailies have taken a keen interest in the profitability of the alternative press – and are tailoring their look and copy accordingly. The 1992 AAN convention kicked off with the announcement that the Washington Post had finally stooped to running personal ads, as the Chronicle has done for some time. Or take a look at the Examiner’s hip, sex-positive Style section and its new Sunday magazine – redesigned, a bit too obviously, in the image of Rolling Stone. Even the conservative Chronicle recently put a story about "tantric sex" on its front page, with an accompanying photograph of a classroom full of couples straddling each other and staring, deeply, into each other's eyes.

As the alties search for respectability and the dailies reach for a hipper readership, the blending of the two threatens to strip the term "alternative" of any remaining meaning.

When the Phoenix New Times reported in 1992 that an illegal alien had discovered gold under a suburban shopping mall, some 300 readers showed up at the mall to stake their claim. The report was a joke – apparently to teach people not to believe everything they read. But while the readers of New Times came up dry, the publishers have struck it rich.

New Times, Inc., which started the Phoenix paper in the early 70's and now owns four other alternative papers across the Sun Belt, has become a powerhouse in the industry. The chain was founded by two former anti-war activists, New Times Executive Editor Mike Lacey and CEO Jim Larkin. They bring a corporatism to their new franchises that many old-timers find antithetical to the spirit in which those papers had been founded.

Brad Bailey, a contributing editor at the Dallas Observer before the New Times took it over, described the arrival of Lacey at the Observer as a scene straight out of some John Wayne remake: "Standing there looking Southwest-Stylish in his blue jeans, silk blazer and lizard-skin boots, Lacey said, pretty abruptly, that he didn't think he'd be needing us anymore."

Sounds far from what we think of as the psychedelic-tinged "alternative" sensibility – and that doesn't bother the New Time folks, who prefer to call their papers "metro weeklies," one bit. As Phoenix editor John Mecklin sees it: "There is no ideology at all to the New Times papers. We are only alternative in that we do journalism in the way it is supposed to be done and in the way it used to be done." Indeed, in Phoenix, the paper garners as much respect as the city’s two dailies by offering a mix of hard-hitting investigative stories and local interest stories.

The chain’s Denver paper, Westword, recently broke a national story by exposing the lenient settlement against the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant for environmental crimes and the failure of prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against plant officials.

Larkin hopes to build a $100 million company, as he stated in a 1991 profile in Forbes magazine, from the ashes of aging alties with owner/editors who are ready to cash in. It obviously doesn't concern Larkin much that such unabashed corporate hankerings sound curiously out of place in papers like his. "The yearning for the old days used to really bother me," says Larkin. "But, honestly, I don't care anymore. The old days weren't that great. This romance for the poverty of the past is so ludicrous. Is it 'alternative' to work at a newspaper where you can't afford to feed a family?"

A few alties, most notably the Bay Guardian, have maintained their anti-corporate, populist sensibilities. Where the New Times might be a paradigm for the new, mainstream brand of altie – sort of the Walmart of alternative journalism – the Bay Guardian is more like a mom-and-pop corner store, the standard bearer for the old sensibility that combines grassroots street politics with a burning desire to fight systemic corruption. Some criticize the Guardian for its drumbeating, dogmatic crusades – witness the flurry of articles on the current political tussle over whether public or private interests will control the Presidio. But few alties have as much impact on local politics.

SF Weekly represents yet another vein in the alternative gold mine: a blending of culture and politics. At their best, papers like the Weekly succeed in combining provocative ideas and good causes. A cover story explaining the rise of mayoral deputy Jim Wunderman, a working-class kid who represents an ascendant San Francisco conservatism often ignored by the left, shows the attention SF Weekly pays to the cultural underpinnings of politics. But at their worst, SF Weekly and similar rags (like the Rachlis-era LA Weekly) can sound self-righteous, sarcastic and shrill, relying on snide attitude, gratuitous irony, and an addiction to hot-button issues to gloss over an essential lack of thoughtfulness.

As SF Weekly editor Andrew O'Hehir describes it, these papers often project a "hipper than thou" attitude which "occasionally convey the impression of being written by and for an increasingly tiny cutting-edge clique of underemployed graduate students and disaffected radicals."

Which begs the question of who is hipper than who, if the generation these papers were designed for is aging out of the genre. Northwestern's Peck terms it the "long in tooth" issue: "As these people get older, have kids, and move to the suburbs," he says, "their local alternative paper becomes a discretionary read in a way it wasn't when they were going out to clubs five nights a week."

Enter The Stranger, a Seattle altie that has a demographic a lot of the industry would kill for (a median age of 27-28, compared to 38-39 industry-wide). The Stranger's most talked-about feature is an advice columnist whom readers address as "Hey, Faggot." When the paper does run political stories, they tend to focus on "things people can have an impact on," says editor S.P. Miskowski. "We run articles about issues while there is still time for readers to call politicians and affect the outcome of the vote."

What the unexpected growth of the Stranger makes clear, though, is that, despite everyone's assertions to the contrary, these people, cynical and technology-oriented though they may be, will still read. The question is whether the alternative press is what they will read. Or, more to the point, whether the alternative press can survive the generation that created it. "The alternative press has reached middle age," says Steve Buel, editor of the San Jose Metro. "At least a half-dozen founding editors have resigned or kicked themselves upstairs in the last couple of years."

Howard Swindle, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, describes attending a panel at a journalism conference where Mike Lacey expounded upon New Times ' commitment to the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the little guy. "I asked him why, if that was so, they did not have a single black on the staff of the Dallas Observer," says Swindle. "And why there are no Observer newsracks in any of the predominantly black portions of Dallas." (Since the conference the Observer has hired an African American staff writer.)

Such hypocrisy is not unique to the New Times papers – in 1993, 88 percent of employees at AAN papers were white (SF Weekly is hardly much better, at 82 percent). Leah Samuels, a black reporter at the Detroit Metro Times, understands that it is tough for papers as small as the alternatives to woo minorities away from the more prestigious and higher-paying dailies. But she believes it is necessary to give the papers any credibility on the social justice front. "I live in a rough neighborhood with lots of vacant lots and party stores. The Metro Times doesn't exist there," says Samuels. "I'm assuming that I can bring up certain issues that the paper has not been able to cover adequately because I know these people and I know the neighborhoods they live in."

Ruth Bond, now a reporter at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegraph, received a minority fellowship at the City Paper in Washington D.C., another predominantly black city. But she left after the one-year fellowship expired and questions whether the paper's failure to fill the job two years later reflects a lack of commitment to diversity. Editor Jack Shafer vows he is still committed to recruiting minority journalists. "The program still exists, there’s just not a ninth day in the week for me to implement it."

Of course, racial equity isn't the only area where the alternative press doesn't practice what it preaches. Although alternative press employees are 57 percent female overall, only 14 percent of the publishers and 16 percent of the editors are women. Patty Calhoun, who started Westword in 1977 and is still the editor, says the paucity of women at the top levels of management is "a reflection of the fact that these papers were started by men who haven’t left." But top-level positions have started to open up, she adds, and women so far haven’t been getting their share of the jobs.

While part of the charm of these papers is their seat-of-the-pants operations and the young, hungry staffers they attract, it is rare that anything but lip service is given to workers' rights. Only a handful of the alternative papers have union representation and the New Times papers are among the few that pay their employees anywhere near market rate. For some artists, writers and editors, the alties may be a way to break into the profession, but many find themselves stuck at low-paying jobs because there are so few opportunities in mainstream journalism. A. Lin Neumann, former managing editor of the Bay Guardian and the Sacramento News and Review, puts it this way: "These papers exploit journalists' political sensibilities and a difficult job market in order to pay depressed wages. The alternative press refuses to recognize that it is built on exploitation."

When I was an intern at the Village Voice during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, I had a conversation about ethics with a writer there. He felt that it was wrong for the new administration to man its transition team with Democratic bigwigs who had sat out the Reagan years making money in the private sector. But these people had experience in government and had been dedicated public servants, I argued. Are we going to rule them out just because they spent time in the private sector? Yes, he replied. Well then, I asked, who would you recommend instead? He modestly mentioned himself, or someone like him – a public interest type who labors on behalf of the citizenry without concern for money or power.

Later on, I thought about the prospect of vetting him for an appointment in the administration. Well, he got his paychecks from the Village Voice, which was owned by Leonard Stern, who also owns Hartz Mountain, a big corporation that makes – among other things – flea collars, which spread poison and contaminate landfills. Murder, environmental degradation, greed – it's all there.

In other words, the alternative press is a for-profit business, full of compromises. The alties are increasingly driven by the bottom line, as papers seeking the big time gobble each other up. "Things are moving toward the same concentration of ownership as the dailies," notes the Metro’s Buel. "In the last couple of years, I would say that the number of companies that own alternative papers peaked. There will be more papers in coming years, but less companies." As the alties grow, they may face a struggle to maintain their identity and mission.

At the same time, it’s also important for the alties to move beyond the self-righteousness of the journalistic poor. There are, after all, other, equally ignoble, motivations that inspire journalists and people who start papers – a desire for respect, for cultural authority. Those in the business who pretend to assume a mantle of selfless purity are in some ways the most self-serving of all, because their motives are hidden from view.

END