On page six of the new Fort Lauderdale weekly XS is a column, headed "Notes From the Underground," which sometimes includes a "Fuck Censorship Department." An April piece on healthcare costs starts this way: "Half the fun of the news business is publishing stories that will really piss people off."

Though it may sound like the work of renegade high school journalists, XS, which made its debut on January 16, is another serious attempt to capture thosed television-bred young adults who tend to shun daily newspapers. And, given its content, its owner is a surprise: Gold Coast Publications, a wholly owned subsidiary of the News and SunSentinel Company of Fort Lauderdale, itself owned by the upstanding, tradition-rich Tribune Company of Chicago.

"This is a little bit out of the ordinary for our company, and it's been a very popular topic of conversation," says Mitch Golub, the Sun-Sentinel's deputy managing editor and chairman of the board that oversees XS. "The thing is, it's different. And large, publicly held newspapers do not do this every day, let alone during tough times."

Those tough times have taken a toll in the area. In February, the Sun-Sentinel dismissed forty-five workers (including five part-time newsroom employees), following layoffs in similar numbers at each of its daily competitors -- Knight-Ridder's Miami Herald and Cox Enterprises' Palm Beach Post. But tough times don't diminish the desire of large publicly held newspapers to take on challengers, and XS takes clear aim at a rival that has the potential to wound: New Times, the three-year-old Miami-based alternative weekly.

If New Times didn't exist, says thirty-three-year-old XS editor and publisher Stephen Wissink, "I'm not sure XS would have come to be. All other papers down here were losing advertising and getting thinner. Everybody noticed that New Times was getting more advertising and getting thicker."

New Times typifies the success of the alternative press, which has roots in the counterculture and rose with its readers into affluence. It is one of three weeklies -- the others are in Phoenix and Denver -- owned by New Times Inc., a company that expects revenues this year of $ 20 million. The Miami paper, which has grown from an average of twenty-four to eighty-eight pages and whose circulation has climbed to 75,000, is expected to pull in $ 3 million this year, enough to turn a profit two years ahead of schedule, according to Miami publisher Julie Felden. Moreover, its core readership of twenty- to forty-five-year-olds is a "retailer's dream," Felden says: 66 percent single, 70 percent white collar, with an average household income of $ 47,800.

Both XS and New Times are free and distributed each Wednesday by bulk drop; both focus heavily on music, art, and entertainment and, to some extent, attract similar advertisers. But there the similarity ends. New Times articles not only tend to be longer but they offer more insight and better writing. Investigative reporting is a staple, and New Times regularly writes about the failures of mainstream reporting in Miami.

XS deliberately aims lower. Restaurant reviews come under the heading BURP! and regular features include a "Villain of the Week." The paper tends to life occasional serious pieces from other publications -- In These Times, for example, or Mother Jones, the source of an April cover reprint on corporate polluters. One of its few recent pieces that was both solid and self-produced was a mischievous profile of a local attorney, Jack Thompson, a self-appointed censor of rap music and the like.

XS is produced in the Sun-Sentinel's new sand-colored, twenty-one story office tower. Editor and publisher Wissink is a former Sun-Sentinel assistant business editor. Some 23,000 copies of XS are being distributed these days, most of them respectably full of advertising. But, says James Smith, the company's director of marketing, "It's too early on to say how successful this has been."

The journalistic reception for XS has been chilly. Take, for example, Rafael Navarro, a contributing writer to The Miami Herald's Sunday magazine. "XS is a case of too little about too much, dressed up in a hyperkinetic attempt to push all the right antiestablishment buttons, as broad and shallow as Roseanne Barr," he wrote recently in a column that failed to note his past employment as a New Times staff writer.

"They're not going to be able to come out with stories critical of local news coverage," Bruce Brugmann, president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and founder of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, told another Herald reporter. "They're not going to raise hell. It's strictly a marketing device."

Wissink is tired of that charge. "Judge the paper for the paper, not for who has a financial interest in it," he says. He has been adjusting the paper's image lately, including watching the profanity more closely. "It was getting a little too gratuitous," he says. "But I'm not going to shy away from it if I think it makes a good journalistic point." He recently made such a judgment, replacing a columnist's "fuck that" with "to hell with that," toning down the language but retaining a sense of outrage on the pressing topic. The story was about banning skateboards at the mall.

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