Showdown at Generation Gap

The alternative press - whose roots lie in underground rags protesting the Vietnam War, celebrating rock-n-roll and the counterculture, and generally nipping at the heels of wealthy mainstream dailies in the late '60s and early '70s - is having a mid-life crisis. And its pooh-bahs are struggling with the simplest questions. What is the alternative press? What's its purpose? "It's a crisis of mission and conscience in the established alternative weeklies," says Christine Triano of the Institute for Alternative Journalism.

At the same time, young entrepreneurs and journalists are developing successful Generation X-oriented weekly tabloids in major cities right under the noses of established alternatives. The new papers are alternatives to alternatives and have little in common with their forebears. They eschew hard news and traditional reporting in favor of satire and socio-cultural commentary; the original alternatives still revel in their roles as gadflies and watchdogs. The new papers only dabble in politics - mostly so-called "identity politics," or what one might call Who-am-I? politics - while the grown-ups of the alternative press wear their left-leaning idealism on their sleeves, even as they gear their coverage more and more toward comfortable suburbanites. The new weeklies don't much reflect the values and revolutionary zeal of the original alternatives, but they are insiders who can look eye-to-eye at their twentysomething audience. And they have inherited the shoestring budgets and the hunger the first alternativesnce had.

The dynamic of the competition, then, is old vs. young, and comfortable vs. struggling. So it's the financial success of the alternative press lifers, at least in part, that has brought them to this crossroads. And, in many cases, the rich are getting richer. The Village Voice bought the L.A. Weekly for a rumored $10 million in January. And alternative chains like New Times, Inc. continue to swallow independents throughout the country (see sidebar, page 39). Corporatization, mergers, newspaper wars, and plain old gray hair have made a lot of alternative newspapers seem in many ways like the mainstream media - The Establishment.

"We've become our parents," says Kate Hawthorne, editor of the newsletter for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, a group of 104 established alternatives boasting a combined circulation of more than 5.5 million. Most of the founding members of the association, she says, have come a long way from eating brown rice and sleeping in the car to save enough money to pay the printer, never in their wildest dreams envisioning the kind of lasting success that is their current reality. "Nobody thought it would happen like this."

While success doesn't necessarily compromise a publication or dull its edge, many established alternatives have for decades thrashed the same agenda - "pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and pro-Grateful Dead," as one old-school alternative journalist half-joked.

"A lot of these weeklies don't realize they're being laughed at," says Tim Keck, publisher of The Stranger, Seattle's upstart alternative with an unmistakable Generation X sensibility. "They're out of touch."

"Out of touch" is perhaps the most damning buzz phrase of the nineties, and it summons another important concern that has arisen for the older alternatives: How do they reach out to Xers? The concern takes on special urgency in the face of competition from weeklies created and staffed by

 young people.

 Appealing to the young and restless twentysomething audience is not only important philosophically; there's also money in it. Generation X is a demographic advertisers crave. College students and young professionals usually don't have kids or house payments, and their income, even if it's paltry, is highly disposable; they buy lots of CDs and books, go to lots of movies and clubs, and eat out often. Along with cash from classified ads and lucrative new 900-number personals, display ad sales are the lifeblood of the alternative press because most of the weekly tabloids that make up its ranks - both new and established - are free to readers and derive no revenue from subscriptions or newsstand purchases. But going after twentysomethings isn't as easy as simply deciding to do so; we're a tricky lot.

"Younger readers," says Keck, "are more wily about how they can be manipulated by the press" and leery of publications that seem to take themselves and their pet issues too seriously. Jay Walljasper, editor of Utne Reader, a digest of alternative journalism, puts it differently: "Young people today, perhaps more than any other generation, have finely tuned b.s. detectors.

"You don't say, ïHey look, you twentysomethings, here's an article on Kurt Cobain.' You'd look like a forty-five-year-old with a nose ring."

Trying to appeal to Generation X without coming off as condescending and cynical - and without alienating older readers - is a balancing act for established alternatives. Some of them are teetering, and that's good news for the leaders of the alternative press's fun-loving, journalistically hollow new wave.

S.P. Miskowski was steamed when she read last year's Fall Fashion issue in the Seattle Weekly, the Grunge Rock capital's nineteen-year-old alternative paper. She objected to its use of "lithe, sweet" models as "bait" for older readers, since young people couldn't possibly afford the haute couture presented. So she let the Weekly have it in an editorial in the appropriately grungy new alternative, The Stranger, which she edits.

"Several recent Weekly covers have touted a mythical version of the youth scene in Seattle," wrote Miskowski. "Bright colors and lead stories on what's new, young, and hot splash the newsstand on a regular basis. Yet the paper's editorial perspective hasn't changed, and the articles are clearly written from the outside, looking in. The gaze remains the same - middle class, middle aged . . . .

"The whole spectrum of social and political activity among people under thirty-five in Seattle," she railed (never mind that she herself is thirty-seven), "is regularly ignored by local media."

In a city like Seattle, internationally celebrated for its youth culture, a perceived void of the nature Miskowski describes is an open call for competition. Publisher Keck, twenty-eight, accepted the invitation three and a half years ago when he and some friends from the University of Wisconsin left behind a humor-oriented college rag they had started, called The Onion, to launch The Stranger. The free weekly has grown from twelve to forty-eight pages in average length and has a circulation of more than 40,000. It has a secure base of GenX-hungry advertisers including many alternative-music clubs and offbeat small businesses, like tattoo parlors and body piercers. Keck says many of the advertisers, who pay roughly half of what they would pay for comparable space in Seattle Weekly, weren't advertising at all, or they were advertising only sporadically in the Weekly, before The Stranger came on the scene and gave them a straight, cheap line to young urbanites.

The Stranger's editorial focus is more on social and cultural commentary and music and arts coverage than on traditional journalism. Miskowski doesn't even consider herself a journalist, per se. The funky alternative's goal isn't "about staying on top of the news day by day," she says. "It's about continuing to question things and continuing to laugh."

A former Stranger editor put it more indelicately when she told a reporter: "We don't have, like, a political agenda; we don't have baby causes. We're just doing it, and it's for profit, and that's the whole point of the thing. And doing hard news - I mean, people have short attention spans. They want something that's going to grab them, something they can laugh at, something that's silly."

There is a short news section called "In the Field" in the front of the tabloid that includes short features with no particular sense of timeliness - a profile of an aging activist-priest, a tale of two homeless youths who were arrested for squatting in an abandoned hotel. There is also a "Call to Action." Readers were recently implored, for example, to speak out against state legislation that would allow parents to commit their underaged kids to mental hospitals against their will.

An op-ed section includes an editorial or two on an odd assortment of national and international topics. Some of them, like a recent piece on the National Endowment for the Arts, are clever and informative. The NEA piece, conspicuously titled "Fuck the NEA," argued that the hoopla over saving the endowment from the GOP knife is foolish given the wealth of other art funding sources that don't carry with them the moral conscience of The American Taxpayer. An editorial on the history and current plight of Mexico's Zapatista peasants was dense and hard to get through without a scorecard.

There is usually one lengthy piece - sometimes a feature, sometimes fiction - that spans two or three pages. The rest of The Stranger is given over to cartoons, reviews, listings, personals, and a handful of in-your-face columns like "Savage Love" - a graphic sex advice column by Dan Savage, a gay drag queen who likes correspondence to him to begin with the salutation, "Hey, faggot." Sexuality, sexual politics, and related issues like AIDS are dealt with frequently and bluntly by The Stranger, whose readership, with a median age of twenty-nine, is 30 percent gay or lesbian, according to a recent demographic survey commissioned by the paper.

 As a whole, The Stranger doesn't derive its appeal to young readers from covering their activities in a traditional journalistic sense; any decent reporter of any age can do that. The Stranger wins over twentysomethings because it sparks and engages in dialogue - without distance from or awe of its readers - on an eclectic batch of issues and ideas that somehow resonates with its audience.

Then there's Seattle Weekly, described by a formidable eastern alternative editor as the most staid of the alternatives. The average age of its readers is late thirties, says Weekly senior editor Eric Scigliano. The Weekly's news coverage and comment are clearly superior - deft analytical reporting and writing on city and state politics and issues like health care and the Great Northwest perennial, the environment. The user-friendly tabloid follows the same successful formula employed by most of the country's alternative weeklies: editorials, news briefs, and a few longer news pieces up front followed by the longish cover story; then the extensive A&E sec-tion with reviews and listings galore; then personals. It's different from most other alternatives in one key way, however; it comes at a price - 75 cents.

"There's probably some resentment of our price tag," says Scig-liano, commenting on what he calls the "generational friction" between his paper and The Stranger. "The Weekly is not a generationally targeted paper," he says. "It never was. The Weekly has always written better than any other paper about city affairs, school-board issues, the whole economy, not just the music economy." He says his paper covers a wide range of ethnic groups and issues of local importance, while The Stranger caters exclusively to a "subculture" of urban Xers.

Miskowski, who's reluctant to categorize her readers as twentysomethings, says she and her staff - average age twenty-nine - are just trying to produce a publication that originates inside the important youth culture of Seattle, an otherwise "dowdy community that takes its well-meaning institutions very seriously.

"We're reporting on the inside instead of just commenting on youth," she says. "It's not, ïIsn't that cute what the kids are doing this week?' There's something really creepy about that."

"I'm so glad Dallas has two free weeklies now," began the letter to the editor of The Met, the new alternative trying to give the fifteen-year-old Dallas Observer, a New Times paper since 1991, a run for its money. "If I'm feeling . . . self-righteous . . . humorless, and desperate for the recognition I so clearly deserve, I pick up one of the weeklies. If I'm feeling . . . goofy . . . young-spirited, and - generally - that the world will go on whether I am here or not, I pick up the other."

Judging from its inclusion in a Met public relations packet, the upstart's editor, Eric Celeste, twenty-seven, appreciates the characterization. Celeste, a former associate editor of D, Dallas's city magazine, and publisher Randy Stagen, twenty-four, joined forces and launched The Met last spring after an agonizing sixteen months raising $250,000 in start-up capital. Stagen, who like Seattle's Keck parlayed his experience of creating a successful college paper into a real-world venture, says the time was right to give the Observer some light-hearted competition.

"My friends and I were getting tired of the constant bombardment of death, crime, and scandal by the Observer," Stagen says. "I just wanted to give the city a paper that wasn't so heavy."

The Met, with its slick, professional design with plenty of easy-on-the-eyes white space and large, generously spaced type, looks more like the Observer than it does The Stranger. But it shares The Stranger's aversion to hard news and lengthy stories. Billed as an "arts and entertainment weekly," The Met doesn't drift too far from its focus, devoting most of its book to solid A&E coverage, reviews, and listings.

The writing, frequently in the first person, is decidedly apolitical, but it's consistently lively and smart and often quite funny - as when The Met's twenty-five-year-old humorist, Tim Rogers, took on the overhyped angst of Generation X in a cover piece. The Met, in its hip vacuousness, is a good read.

"My reader," explains Stagen, "doesn't care that city hall is stealing from us. He cares that there's a great band playing tonight and that there's cold beer at Phil's Bar."

On the business front, The Met's ad strategy was designed to compete with the Observer, says Stagen. Identical ad sizes make Observer ads an easy fit in The Met, and a bargain at 35 to 45 percent cheaper than the Observer.

The Met staff has aggressively marketed its paper - "guerrilla marketing," as Stagen puts it - with radio promotions, a dial-a-hit phone service audibly showcasing the local bands the paper covers, and a foray onto the Internet, a first among Texas weeklies. But despite Stagen and Celeste's claims of unexpected, runaway success - with a circulation of 50,000, and growing as they have from an average of thirty-two pages to forty-eight in about a year - Observer editor Peter Elkind says matter-of-factly that he does not feel threatened, a sentiment echoed by the Observer's ad director.

"I don't think we compete with The Met," Elkind says. To be sure, his paper's circulation doubles that of The Met. And Elkind says the Observer's A&E reporters and critics, including three twenty-six-year-olds, are the best in town. "We're more in touch than we've ever been," he says, obviously unfazed at being on the wrong side of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's 1995 "What's In, What's Out" list, opposite The Met.

Elkind is proud of the hard-news bent at the Observer - by all counts a solid journalistic enterprise, reflecting New Times's reputation for having the highest standards stacks of money can buy. And he says he doesn't need to lighten up to appeal to Xers. "I think younger readers care about what's going on in government and business just like people over thirty," he says. "I don't think there's a virtue in being frivolous."

"We want to cut through all the pompousness," says The Met's Celeste. "If we can be too juvenile, they can be too preachy. I think it's better to be too juvenile." He does worry about not being taken seriously as a journalist, but not about The Met's allergy to issues. "We reflect the new counterculture, which is nonideological. Let's be smart about what we take seriously and not wake up in twenty years and be disillusioned."

Perhaps the alternative-weekly scene in Chicago offers a hopeful glimpse into the future for The Stranger and The Met. It's been nearly a decade since the ahead-of-its-time Hieggelke family began to carve its flashy, youth-oriented niche in the Windy City, in the shadow of the greatly respected, twenty-three-year-old Reader. In 1986, Brian, then twenty-three, his wife Jan, then twenty-four, and his kid brother Brent, then nineteen, created NewCity.

The Reader rivaled Seattle Weekly as a tempting target for a bright, hip competitor, intimidating as it is with its dizzyingly long, literary cover stories - around 9,000 words on average - and its colorless bulk. The paper is usually around 180 pages long and comes in four sections, each of which is as fat as NewCity in its entirety, around 48 pages.

Brian Hieggelke, NewCity editor and co-publisher, says that he and his relatives wanted to "create something lively" as an alternative to the Reader. Hesitant to categorize his readers as GenX and risk alienating potential older readers, as all the new alternative editors have been, the elder Hieggelke says, tellingly, that when Richard Nixon died last year his paper barely mentioned it. "But when Kurt Cobain died, that was our cover story."

What's hopeful about Chicago, in addition to the continuing success of NewCity, with its circulation now at a smooth 64,000, is the healthy competition between the two weeklies - and the Reader's acceptance of the Xers-vs.-Boomers dynamic so obviously at play.

Reader senior editor Michael Miner says his staff tries to keep its many pages fresh by running frequent free-lance pieces by twentysomethings. And the paper is currently undergoing a makeover to make it more visually exciting. But the Reader (circulation 137,000) faces facts: "We identified a readership back in '71 that has grown older with us," explains Miner, who says he likes "fresh and short" NewCity.

Hieggelke says he has "expanded the market, rather than divided it" with his paper. Chicago, he says, is big enough for two alternative weeklies. Dallas and Seattle probably are, as well.

"We don't want to set ourselves up as a primary source of information," says The Stranger's Miskowski. "We encourage people to read widely and critically."

For his part, Dallas's Celeste says his young readers are smart citizens who read a variety of publications and who are not necessarily disengaged slackers. He says he doesn't even mind if they read the Observer. For now. But Celeste's long-term plans for The Met include gradually adding more hard news to his paper's party-hearty menu. He plans this gradual addition, he says, to coincide with the gradual aging of his readers, leaving the frivolity of youth to the young.

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