Over at Los Angeles magazine, the redoubtable R.J. Smith writes about the Village Voice-New Times merger in progress. I like R.J.; I think he’s a solid and accessible writer who knows how to turn a phrase and how to let it sing by not overworking its setting.
This is a complaint I’ve had about alternative weeklies for a while; many of them lack discipline in the writing (and therefore in the editing). That’s not the same thing as saying they are badly written or badly edited; they could just be better, not by using bigger or more words, but by using more precise words, and less of them.
I guess it’s not much of a lesson to have learned, but to my eye and ear, much of the writing I like best is signified as much by what is not written as by what is. That kind of writing is good for two reasons. First, it’s a more artful use of language (yes, silence is a writerly tool; what serious musician doesn’t know how to use pauses and descresendos and retardando?) Second, it gives readers credit for having read a thing or two in the years and days leading up to the moment when this brilliant expose in this cheeky alt-weekly landed in their lap ready to change their lives.
Smith is one of those breed of music writers who graduated from music criticism to music journalism, and from there to unadulterated journalism when required. He serves he’ll as well as anyone I can think of to represent the past of the alt-weekly, and quite possibly the future. (Los Angeles magazine. When good alt-weeklies die, do they become glossy city monthlies?)
My only bone to pick with his assessment is his main premise: That alt-weeklies are mainly for children. OK, then: the youth. It is a cliche repeated many times over that the alternative press is the organ of youth culture, youth movement. Whatever the kids are up to today, well, read all about it in The Stranger, or The New Times, or the Pitch, or The Scene. That was true at one time, particularly the period of time that made alterntative weeklies so successful, both as businesses and journalistic enterprises. That period of time was the eighties and the nineties, and the people mainly responsible for the “commodification of the cool” were Gen X music critics and their boomer bosses, who cashed in on the spontaneous human combustion of homegrown alternative rock.
Of course the alternative press existed for a long time before Kurt Cobain. And it surely existed for the “youth” of America. But I think of the alternative press of the 50s, 60s, and 70s as a vehicle of ageless counterculture, decentralized, jerry-rigged, irreverent, doing good work but having much fun, getting by on a shoestring, because a shoestring was still a metric that could hold up the bottom line. That can’t happen anymore (although I hear they still take your shoestrings at the county jail–a shoestring can’t save you, but it’s still works as the ultimate escape strategy).
So the larger question is: What has happened to the alternative press? Well, in my view it aged, but it never grew up. But its readership did grow up. People I know who were avid readers of the alternative press simply don’t find much to read in them anymore. They are not jaded, they just wish to be rewarded for spending their time with the newspaper; to see their alt-weeklies operating like time-machines back to 1989, replete with the same politics and record reviews of their youth, driven by the same passions, still writing too many words about too few subjects other than the author, leavened with too much depressing news about intractable realities– well, you can understand how a busy young professional with kids and mortgage and car payments doesn’t feel too guilty about giving up old habits like the alternative weekly, he hasn’t seen a show or bought a CD or written a letter to his congressman for about five years. He knows he should, mainly because a lot of free newspapers are reminding him that he should. Maybe he will. Next week.
Alternatively, of course, the Alt Weekly could engage a new, younger readership to bury the old one. I personally believe–in fact I know, because they come through our office every 15 weeks or so, as interns–that there are plenty of kids who somehow, against all odds, picked up the habit of reading for pleasure and edification. But the cards are stacked so highly against them getting into the production end of things–the writing and the editing and the shot-calling–that we the print media have pretty much ceded these readers to the Web (as R.J. Smith suspects).
So what’s the solution? Probably focusing not so much on readerships as on readers, writing not to demographics but to curiosities. What has your alt-weekly done lately that made you happy to be a reader? What have you read in newsprint lately that met the highest standard of the written word–the story that is more painful to stop reading than to finish?
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