EMERGING ALTERNATIVES
A Passion For Print
This is a corrected version of the story that appears in the print issue.
In 2002, when the Justice Department hit Village Voice Media and New Times Media — the two largest alternative weekly chains — with an antitrust lawsuit, the mainstreaming of the original underground press felt nearly complete. Today about half the 116 papers in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) are controlled by chains. A new breed of alternative media is coalescing on the Internet, but the allure of print persists. Here are a handful of young papers that have that labor-of-love feel, and are trying to fill the generation gap between themselves and their alternative forefathers.
Philadelphia Independent
The aesthetic of the quirky Philadelphia Independent, a monthly that debuted in January 2002, harks back to the newspapers of the nineteenth century: outrageous headlines with more tiers than a wedding cake and retro graphics printed on old-fashioned broadsheet, measuring a foot and a half by two feet.
The Independent's content is equally idiosyncratic, as evidenced by a feature that delves into the "ageless" allure of skee-ball, or a profile of gutsy bike messengers. In March the entire issue was devoted to the war with Iraq, leading with the headline, war kills people. A self-consciously loquacious deck elaborates: sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, neighbors, soldiers, civilians, babies, etc.
Twenty-four-year-old publisher Mattathais Schwartz has learned to play the role of editor, ad man, paperboy (he often hawks them on the subway platform), and delivery boy (he pedals a tricycle around town, stocking corner honor boxes). In the first issue of the Independent, Schwartz vowed to never sell the paper. "I don't even want the paper to have investors because then it would become like any other job for me," he says.
Urban Dialect
When Village Voice Media shuttered The Cleveland Free Times last fall — as part of the deal with New Times that drew Justice Department scrutiny — it gave Daniel Gray-Kontar, a former associate editor at the Free Times, a chance to fill a bit of the generation gap. He launched Urban Dialect in March. The monthly magazine, with a circulation of 5,000, aims to give a voice to the "hip-hop generation," Gray-Kontar says, in a city that is 51 percent African American.
Recent articles include a piece about Muslim musicians working to eradicate misogynistic lyrics, as well as a story criticizing black state legislators for supporting GOP tax cuts. UD also publishes a column by "Mud Foot, the ghetto communicator," written in street vernacular. The magazine skews young and urban, largely ignoring the suburbs.
The Weekly Dig
Jeff Lawrence is taking his second shot at an alternative to the alternative. In 1997, frustrated that the Boston Phoenix, the city's alternative weekly, wasn't, as Lawrence says, "daring to be different" from the mainstream press, he begged, borrowed, and maxed out his credit cards to raise the cash for a feisty monthly magazine called Shovel. After losing "lots of money," Lawrence buried Shovel in 1999.
Undaunted, he soon started a weekly to go head-to-head with the Phoenix. With "The best little paper in Boston" as its tagline, The Weekly Dig1 is stirring things up.
As evidence, Lawrence points to a recent controversial three-part series questioning how AIDS is diagnosed and treated. One piece suggests "toxic" AIDS drugs are causing liver failure. Another explores the possibility that activists are working to give "potentially deadly" AIDS drugs to African governments, who will misuse them.
Eat The State!
In 1996 Geov Parrish and his friends were fed up with local press coverage in Seattle. "Nobody was challenging the power brokers in city hall," says Parrish, forty-three. So he began publishing a weekly four-page, photocopied newsletter that sought to do just that.
Eat the State! soon expanded to eight pages. And by 1999, Parrish and a volunteer staff began selling ads, switched to biweekly publication, and churned out 8,000 copies on newsprint. Soon they were calling for the resignation of Seattle's police chief, and chastising state lawmakers for opposing a proposal to end a regressive sales tax. ETS! now has a "fiercely loyal" following, Parrish says.
They come for stories such as PEACE ON EARTH: MAYBE NEXT YEAR and VISION IRAQ — WARLORD DEMOCRATIC FEDERALISM. They come, too, for features like an annual list of "the most overhyped and underreported stories of the year," and the activist directories that grace back pages of every issue.
The unifying characteristic is an appreciation of the "forum for antiauthoritarian political opinion, research, and humor" that ETS! promises on every cover.
L.A. Alternative Press
The Silver Lake Press was launched in April 2002 to cover community politics and the burgeoning music scene in East Los Angeles. "It almost looked like a high school paper," recalled publisher Martin Albornoz, who considered the enterprise little more than a hobby, even though he and his wife, Yvette Doss, invested $20,000 of their savings to start the biweekly paper.
Six months later, when New Times L.A. closed, Albornoz saw an opening. In November 2002 his amateur paper was reincarnated as the L.A. Alternative Press and switched to a tabloid format with a strong neighborhood base, akin to alternatives in the '70s, Albornoz says.
This is due, in part, to features such as "Know Your Neighbor," devoted to profiling the not-so-rich-and-famous throughout East L.A.: for example, a performer who hosts the longest-running open-mike night in the city, a jilted girlfriend who recently moved to Silver Lake, and an artist who eschews material possessions.
1. In this article, which ran in the September/October issue, the name of “The Weekly Dig” was erroneously explained as “a reference to Boston’s massive $15 billion underground highway project.” In fact, according to Jeff Lawrence, the weekly’s publisher, the Dig’s name derives from “the history of its predecessor, Shovel Magazine, the idea of ‘unearthing’ the untold story, and our love of old-school phrases like ‘Can you dig it?’”
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