The Identity Crisis

By: Mark Fitzgerald As the oldest of them push past 40, alternative newspapers are still trying to figure out what they're going to be when they grow up. Like many another baby boomer watching his belly spill over the waistband of his Relaxed Fit 550 Levi's, part of the alternative press despairs that its g-g-generation has lost its fire and become exactly the complacent middle-class American booboisie it loathed. Meanwhile, another, and growing, part of the alt-press scorns those one-time pioneers as nostalgia-befogged, aged hippies who squandered their youth on empty indulgence when they should have been fully funding their IRAs and celebrating their final mortgage payments with appletinis.

As we researched this month's cover story, my colleague Jennifer Saba and I were reminded there's a class war going on in the alternative press. Alternative papers are moving in several different directions -- and they all have something snide to say about where the other guy is going. This is an intramural contest among papers that consider themselves the "real" alternatives, not those free papers created by mainstream dailies they dismiss as "faux alternatives."

We made a point of ending our interviews with a seemingly simple question: What the heck is an alternative paper these days, anyway? We got many conflicting answers, but the responses tended to cluster around two opposite poles that could be personified by two well-known figures in the alternative press.

In one corner is San Francisco Bay Guardian co-owner/Editor Bruce B. Brugmann, who in 1965 launched an alternative that defined the type: loud, aggressive, left-leaning -- and a scourge of the hometown dailies. For four decades, the Guardian has unapologetically tilted against windmills, sometimes literally, as in its decades-long campaign to impose city ownership on the local utility company.

In the other corner is Michael Lacey, who as executive editor of the largest chain of alternatives, Village Voice Media (VVM), has brought discipline to the business and journalism of alt-papers. Think global if you'd like, Lacey tells his journalists, but keep it to yourself, bub. Hit the streets and write local.

"Our readers already have opinions -- they don't need someone who is posing as the sophomore in the dorm room philosophizing on what it means," Lacey says. "Our guy isn't going to sit there and gas on about something. He's going to dig something up."

Like many polar opposites, Lacey and Brugmann share more characteristics than perhaps they'd care to acknowledge.

Both emphasize local investigative journalism, though Guardian projects tend to reinforce the argument that the whole System is corrupt, man, while VVM newspapers are likely to leave it at the conclusion that Councilman Smith is corrupt.

Both introduced big advances in color and design, with the Guardian going for typically San Franciscan celebratory excess and VVM tabs for a more clean, efficient look.

And both are outsized personalities convinced that theirs is the right way forward for the alternative press.

While often confused with the New Left "underground" papers of the Vietnam War era, alternatives never really marched in lockstep as fellow travelers. Certainly the New Times chain, which acquired the VVM papers and adopted the Voice's name, has often been described as Libertarian, or even neo-conservative.

But even that is a matter of opinion, says New Times veteran Tony Ortega, who is the current editor of the flagship Village Voice. When he was in Phoenix, New Times went after the conservative Republicans who mostly ran things, and got tagged as a liberal rag. In Los Angeles, where liberal Democrats dominate, he says, "our paper there got a reputation for being a neocon publication."

Washington City Paper Editor Erik Wemple puts it pretty plainly: "The whole antiestablishment thing -- that still is in the DNA of the industry."

But other publishers dissent from that idea. "I think if you ask New Times, they would say absolutely, their model is playing the role of 'F*** The Man,' but I think it's a wrongheaded notion," says Ben Eason, president and CEO of the Creative Loafing alt-chain. Alternatives should be tough enough to stand up to City Hall but also bring the community together, he says.

J. Patrick Best, publisher and co-founder of The Sunday Paper in Atlanta, similarly argues that readers want something more optimistic than the traditional alternative model -- or the reflexively cynical 2.0 version that's largely replaced it. "The alternative press is stuck in the '90s," he says.

At the same time alt-papers are engaging in this soul-searching, they're confronting generational turnover and an audience that doesn't necessarily share Boomer preoccupations, notes Abe Peck, an underground newspaper pioneer in Chicago now teaching at Northwestern University: "You get readers who are less committed to reviews of Persian films, or learning about the war, or a 6,000-word expose; of landlords -- they want to know where to go on a Friday night."