Age of the Mega-Alternatives

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"Alternative weeklies are still growing," explains Ron Williams, who founded and owns alternative papers in Detroit and Orlando. " Dailies have not been doing well financially for a while, and now monthly city magazines are facing problems. The alternative newsweekly is still a going market." Indeed, according to AAN, overall circulation of alternative weeklies has doubled to 6.3 million in the past six years.

Until recently the vast majority of weeklies were locally owned, usually by people with close links to activists or the arts community. But that picture began to change in the late '80s, as existing papers moved into Sun Belt cities where alternative weeklies were a newer phenomenon.The Phoenix New Times, an Arizona paper that harshly rejects any suggestion of an ideological mission for the alternative press, was particularly aggressive. After buying papers in Denver, Houston, and Dallas, and launching one in Miami, it then moved into even larger markets by purchasing the SF Weekly and mounting a challenge to the venerable San Francisco Bay Guardian, which has been publishing since 1966. New Times also set its sights on Los Angeles and, after losing out to Stern in a bid to capture L.A. Weekly, bought two other smaller papers and merged them into NewTimes Los Angeles .

In fact, Stern and New Times seemed to be locked in an expansion duel. "If New Times has been the 400-pound gorilla of the alternative press world," quips Williams, "then Stern is now the 600-pound gorrilla. " When it looked like New Times would buy the Twin Cities Reader and wanted City Pages to sell to them as well, Stern stepped in to buy City Pages. That set the stage for New Times to bow out of Minneapolis and for Stern to pick up the financially strapped Reader at a fire sale price. New Times also pursued the Seattle Weekly, until Stern weighed in with an offer.

Among the alternative weeklies, there has always been joint ownership (The Chicago Reader owns Washington City Paper); small regional chains (a long-standing one in Connecticut and western Massachusetts and a newer one in Northern California and Nevada); and even some mainstream ownership (Rupert Murdoch owned The Village Voice for a few years). There has never, however, been merging on this scale. And despite alternative editors' assertions about how different they are from their mainstream competitors, identical business forces seem to be guiding their industry: consolidation and chain ownership.

What impact will these changes have on the quality and independence of the alternative weeklies? The jury is still out. Christine Triano, program director of the Institute for Alternative Journalism, a nonprofit group founded by alternative weeklies to promote independent journalism, predicts that it will affect the character of the papers in subtle ways. "How does nonlocal ownership affect anything?" she asks. "It' s a homogenizing influence. It removes the local imprint."

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