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Charts & Tables
Alternative
By the Project for Excellence in Journalism
After years of essentially owning the weekly news and arts
market and seeing rising readership and revenue, the nation's
alternative-weekly publishers are finding a different world
in the beginning of the 21st century. Competition has come
to the field from a variety of sources. Daily newspapers in
major cities have launched free commuter tabloids that are
available at mass-transit stops. Big chains like Gannett have
launched free weeklies that compete directly with the smaller
alternatives. Online services like Craigslist, serve as everything
from classified-ad pages to community news centers, are drawing
away classified advertising dollars.
Those changes have all hit the alternative weeklies where
they are most vulnerable: in advertising revenue, where the
weeklies get all their money for operation. Yet the new competition,
while potentially threatening, has not yet dented in any real
way the bottom line of the alternative weeklies. After two
or three soft years, industry revenues have begun to climb
again, albeit not at the torrid pace of the 90's. The question
is whether the weeklies are simply more resilient than other
media that have suffered against new competition - like newspapers
that have suffered with the Internet's growth - or whether
these alternative weeklies challengers are still relatively
immature.
The weeklies' new competitors for revenue bring some distinct
advantages to the table. The commuter dailies and chain-owned
free weeklies have more extensive distribution networks in
place. They can sell ads at special rates for both the daily
paper and the free paper. Their local marketing muscle can
overwhelm smaller competitors. And the fact that they are
affiliated with or owned by the local daily newspapers means
they often have the advantage of lower printing costs. Where
classifieds are concerned, Internet services can offer search
engines that make the task easier for those seeking goods
and services, along with the ability to update with new listings
regularly. Most alternative weeklies have their own Web classifieds,
and many of them have been quite successful in generating
revenues. But services like Craigslist are free, and that
is hard for any pay-for-ads Web site to compete with.
Despite the new competition in advertising, the content of
alternative weeklies is still distinct. Their mission, to
provide a pugnacious counterpoint in news and arts coverage,
is not matched by their competitors, which are chasing the
revenue model more than the content model. The question is
whether their specialized content will override the advantages
of newer outlets and convince enough advertisers to stick
where they are.
Alternative weeklies are still relatively strong, especially
considering the troubles many print outlets have had in recent
years, but the competition has grown.
Audience
In 2004, after two years of decline, circulation of alternative
weeklies gained momentum. According to the Association of
Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), a trade organization, circulation
rose to 7.5 million, up from 7.3 million in 2003, an increase
of about 3%. The audience is still down from the all-time
high of nearly 8 million in 2001, but on the current track,
it may get back there soon.
Most in the industry attributed the drop to the recession,
which dried up advertising money and, in turn, led to the
closing of some weeklies in competitive markets.
Besides the recession and the closing of a few papers, some
reasons for the declines in circulation were a slide in both
sales and traffic in record stores, where most weeklies are
distributed; the replacement of locally owned stores with
chains that are less likely to allow free publications to
distribute; a proliferation in the number of free-circulation
publications in general (e.g., shoppers, real estate guides,
auto traders), which has led to restrictive news-rack ordinances
in many cities and markedly increased the competition for
retail distribution space; and the growth of alt-weekly Web
sites, which allow a portion of the papers' audience (especially
those who read solely for the listings or classifieds) to
get the content without picking up the papers.
Growth in Alternative News Weeklies
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Association of Alternative Newsweelies Member Publications,
1989 - 2004
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Your Own Chart
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Over time the readership of these publications has changed,
growing slightly grayer and wealthier along with the overall
American population.
- The median age of alternative-weekly readers increased
from 38.4 in 1997 to 40.0 in 2003.
- The average household income of readers increased from
$50,583 in 1995 to $64,120 in 2003.
Readership among all groups grew over the period examined
in the chart above, but older audiences grew as a percentage
of the readership.
Consider, for example, how the oldest age group has increased
as a percentage of the papers' total readership - an 8% rise
in readers 50 and older since 1995 - while the percentage
of readers in other age groups is slowly declining.
The readership has also become more family-oriented. A higher
percentage was married in 2003 than in 1992-1994 (a period
for which the organization aggregated data) - 46.9% in 2003
compared to 36.4% in 1992-94. The number of readers with children
at home grew even more sharply, from 28.4% in 1992-94 to 40%
in 2003.
What's more, those trends are the opposite of what the nation
at large is experiencing. For that same period, 1992 to 2003,
nationwide Census figures show the percentage of married households
falling from 55% to 51%.
The percentage of families with children under 18 at home
declined from 49% to 48%.
What accounts for the differences between the demographics
for alternative weekly readers and those for the general population?
One possibility is that the same issues that appeared to skew
polling in the last presidential election are at play. The
demographic data are gathered by interviews that require respondents
to spend more than half an hour on the phone, which may tend
to capture more married-with-children respondents; young people
are less likely to be home or to take the time for the survey.
Such polls also don't include people who rely on cell phones
for communication and may not even have land-line phones in
their homes. Again, such people tend to be younger. Still,
there seems to be little question that alternative weekly
readers are more likely to be married with children as they
age.
The demographic shifts suggest that alternative weeklies
are growing into a more serious, or at least a more mature,
news source. That's not to say the best-known and most respected
among the weeklies (The Village Voice in New York, Chicago
Reader) only recently started taking their commitment to news
seriously. They have considered themselves serious news organizations
for years. But the alternative weeklies are increasingly perceived
as serious news organizations by the mainstream media as their
readership grows.
The shifts in demographics and in perceptions may also have
to do with new publications' joining the field and joining
AAN. In 1995, the organization included 52 publications in
46 markets. By 2003 it had 108 weeklies in 72 markets.
Economics
While final numbers weren't available when this report was
finished, estimates for 2004 revenues among the weeklies put
the total at $550 million. That would be a record for the
weeklies and a substantial increase - $21 million or almost
4% - over 2003 figures.
AAN internal surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that the
growth came primarily in three areas: Local retail, real estate
classifieds and national advertising.
National advertising is still a relatively small part of
alternative weekly business, about 6% to 7% industry-wide.
Small-market papers get no national advertising, and the largest
papers top out at approximately 15% of total revenue. Still,
the early national ad numbers for 2004 look good. The Alternative
Weekly Network, which coordinates national ad sales for 100
papers, had not posted final 2004 data at the time of this
report, but a preliminary accounting showed an increase of
20%, to $14 million, for national ads.
That's dramatic, particularly since the 2003 ad dollar figures
were up roughly 7% from the previous year.
As the economy recovers it is often those big advertisers
who are looking to spend money first. National ad sales for
the weeklies historically involved tobacco or alcohol products,
according to Alternative Weekly Network. National sales on
the whole have been growing in recent years, though tobacco
ad dollars have been declining and replaced primarily by financial,
automotive, high-tech, and telecommunications ads. Some of
the changes undoubtedly reflect the graying and greening -
growing wealth - of alternative-weekly audiences. National
dollars may have presaged the larger overall ad-dollar increase
the weeklies apparently experienced in 2004, as smaller local
advertisers also began to advertise more.
The alternative weeklies are arguably the most sensitive
to economic problems. The vast majority rely solely on advertising,
and don't get any boost from subscription dollars. The revenue
boost in 2004, following an increase of less than 1% in 2003
and small declines in 2002 and 2001, may be a sign that the
economy has turned a corner. It also suggests that so far
anyway, the weeklies have not lost advertisers to the new
competition in any large measure.
But there may be problems lying in wait for these publications.
First, the struggles of small local retailers, which are increasingly
being challenged by superstore "category killers,"
hurt weeklies as well, since many local ad dollars come from
those small stores. Second, the continued rise of Internet
and Web-based classified advertising [see Online
Economics] will probably divert more money from the revenue
stream. We'll discuss those changes more fully in the next
section. Suffice it to say the revenue numbers for the alternative
weeklies, while good, don't necessarily point to a bonanza
ahead.
Ownership
Ownership among the biggest players remained stable in 2004,
with no major openings or closings. New Times, the largest
owner, held on to its eleven weeklies, while Village Voice
media kept its six.
There was activity in specific markets around the country,
often involving battles between large companies and independent
owners.
In San Francisco in October, the family-owned Bay Guardian
filed suit against two New Times weeklies in the area, charging
that New Times and the weeklies had sold ads below cost to
put the Guardian out of business. The Guardian said New Times
was "breaking the law and using its considerable national
resources in an effort to destroy a locally owned competitor
so it will have the San Francisco alternative market to itself."
In Boston there was a new owner when Metrocorp, the publisher
of Boston Magazine and Philadelphia Magazine, purchased a
majority ownership of Boston's Weekly Dig. The Dig, with a
light approach to the news and a lad-magazine sensibility
(think Maxim) is the self-proclaimed fastest-growing alternative
weekly in the area with an unaudited circulation of 50,000.
That number still places it far behind the long-time leader,
the Boston Phoenix, which has an unaudited readership of 109,000.
But the influx of dollars and resources Metrocorp could put
into the Dig may make it more of a competitor.
The changes in San Francisco and Boston show how quickly
the world of alternative weeklies is evolving. The increasing
revenue numbers and desirable demographics these publications
offer has not gone unnoticed. And as independents are being
challenged by the "big" companies, the "big"
companies are facing competition from even bigger challengers.
New Challenges
In addition to battling among themselves, alternative weeklies
are tying to ward off competition from two different fronts.
First is the arrival of free dailies, small ad-driven tabloids
given out by daily newspapers primarily to mass-transit commuters.
At the same time they are seeing the rise of what they call
"faux alternatives," weekly ad-driven tabs started
by the towns' dominant daily newspapers, aimed at competing
with the alternative weeklies directly.
Whether the new rivals prove to be long-term competition
remains to be seen. Both can work off content from their mainstream
publications. The free dailies also have the money to station
people at mass-transit nodes where riders are looking for
something to read on their way to work or around town. These
papers can guarantee a lot of eyes.
Content
The real concern with the new competitors, however, is their
central mission.
The free daily newspapers are not expected to thrive in and
of themselves. Rather, they try to siphon off some of the
available advertising dollars and steer readers to the parent
publications, the metropolitan dailies that created them.
The dailies will do anything they can to reach younger readers,
who seem to be shunning daily newspapers.
The metropolitan papers' free dailies usually limit their
content to wire service copy. They are loath to offer free
the same content they would like readers to pay for. Most
of the free dailies don't even have a reporting staff as such.
The weeklies launched by large companies have a different
approach. They want to take on the alternative weeklies more
directly in terms of editorial packaging and are looking to
attract younger audiences with heavy emphasis on entertainment
coverage. There have been some significant startups in recent
years. Tribune has attempted to climb into the free-weeklies
market in Florida. Gannett has launched free weeklies in small
and medium-sized cities around the country - Boise, Cincinnati,
Indianapolis, Louisville, Lansing, Mich., Rochester, N.Y.,
Greenville, S.C. - in hopes of grabbing some audience that
would normally gravitate to the alternative weeklies. Times
Publishing Company, which publishes the St. Petersburg Times,
started tbt* in the Tampa Bay area. Cox has entered the game
with AccessAtlanta. And for several years now Knight Ridder
has been publishing Street Miami.
Among all of these companies, Tribune has experimented the
most with the new youth-oriented formats. In Chicago, of course,
it has RedEye, a paid-circulation daily (although many copies
are given away) with content that is more like what one might
see in a big-company weekly than a commuter daily. Tribune
also owns a majority interest in amNewYork, a commuter daily.
In Broward County, Fla., its Sun-Sentinel has been publishing
a weekly called City Link (previously called XS) for years.
And several years ago, Tribune acquired the Advocate/Weekly
chain of four alternative papers in New England.
But the traditional alternative weeklies maintain that such
efforts fall short of what they offer, notably local political
and arts coverage. "They don't concern our members in
terms of coverage," says Richard Karpel of AAN. "But
they concern our members as businesses."
When it comes to content, Karpel says, the new corporate
weeklies tend to avoid delving into local politics or contentious
arts issues that the alternative papers cover. "These
papers are limited by the corporate culture of the companies
that own them," he says. "They try not to offend."
Indeed, some believe that the edginess that is so characteristic
of the alternative weeklies, the willingness to challenge
community assumptions and norms, is what is threatened in
the longer run. (And some weekly-watchers say the boldness
has already waned since ownership has grown more "corporate.")
With the help of AAN, the Project for Excellence in Journalism
solicited reactions to the new competition from a group of
alternative-weekly editors around the country. Their words,
quoted below at some length, are revealing.
There is some concern over the possibility of losing ad dollars
to their new competitors, but there is also a disdain for
what the editors consider "faux weeklies" and the
kind of journalism the older alternative press believes these
new challengers represent. What we hear in the editors' words
is a clash of cultures, between a publishing world grounded
in longer pieces, idiosyncratic writers, and literary voice
in journalism, and what the editors consider an anti-literary,
focus-group driven big-business competition.
Vince O'Hearn, publisher of the Isthmus in Madison, Wisconsin:
" Our market has been host to a faux-alt startup
titled Core Weekly
(published by Capital Newspapers Inc.) for the last two months.
It has not
gained traction in the marketplace so far. They are putting
out 48 pages a
week with about 5 pages of display, which we have determined
was either
given free or for a very low price, and six or seven pages
of classified,
all of which are lifted from the daily product. They are causing
us not a
whiff of problem to date, though their sniffing around our
advertisers is
unsettling. Very few, or maybe none, are interested in their
blandishments.
… Incidentally, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is rollingout
their faux-alt
(they call it an alternative) this week or next."
Chuck Strouse, editor of New Times Broward-Palm Beach
in Fort Lauderdale:
"Our Tribune Company-owned competition, CityLink,
has gone through a rather radical
transformation - replacing news with shorter, youth, youth,
youth-driven stories. Pretty much all attempts at writing
about politics or afflicting the comfortable or serious journalism
or substance - which was something they once attempted - is
gone. As are people over 25,
serious art criticism, folk music, classical music, and anything
of more
sophisticated culture. The paper was here long before we were
- but now looks more like a commuter daily for dummies …"
Alison True, editor of Chicago Reader:
"Here's one effect [of the arrival of the new competition]:
an irritating tendency on the part of other media to erroneously
compare the Reader to local youth dailies.
After our recent long-overdue redesign, a poster to an online
discussion
accused us of "getting all Tribune on our ass. Bigger
font, more color, big
pretty pictures? C'mon!" And a recent report on arts
coverage in dailies, put out by the NAJP [National Arts Journalism
Program] at Columbia, said youth-oriented dailies put out
by Gannett and Tribune Co. "mimic" local weeklies.
I don't know about other cities, but they don't do that here.
We run magazine-style long and short features, essayistic
arts reviews, and exhaustively complete entertainment listings.
We compete with the dailies for ads and for readers' time,
but there's little overlap in content."
There is undoubtedly some truth to those critiques of the
new competition, but there are larger long-term content questions
ahead for the alternative weeklies as well. The weeklies grew
out of the New Journalism movement, which meant many were
formed around long stories and distinctive writing voices.
The Village Voice came of late-1950s and early-1960s New York
and the thinking of people like Norman Mailer, one of its
co-founders. That period of evolution continued for years.
The Chicago Reader, for instance, didn't appear until 1971.
The template of those papers was and remains stories like
those that appeared in the early days of Rolling Stone, boundary-pushing
stories about things that didn't get coverage elsewhere.
Now the question is whether that format, which helped the
papers increase circulation and ad revenues, will be as popular
with the next generation of readers. As we show in the audience
section of this chapter, the readers of the weeklies are growing
richer and becoming more family-oriented, but they are also
growing older.
The model the new (and what critics call "faux")
alternative weeklies are using does not follow the long-form
literary style of "new journalism." The model is
more along the lines of the quintessential magazine of the
1990s, "Entertainment Weekly" - short story-lets
designed for quick reading. And indeed some of the old-line
alternative weeklies are experimenting with this model of
journalism. "We live in a TV- and Web-dominated world,
where pictures increasingly trump words, and attention spans
grow shorter and more fractured," writes Richard Karpel
of AAN. "And there is a widespread recognition in our
industry that we need to find new ways to communicate with
readers if we expect them to continue to pick us up. The challenge
for us is how to do that while maintaining our core mission."
It's not yet clear how much of an impact the new challenges
will have on alternative weeklies over the long haul. Yet
more is at stake culturally and journalistically in this dispute
than which free-circulation tabloid paper prevails. The two
kinds of papers offer different things to their communities.
If the older alternative weeklies pass away, what replaces
them as advertising vehicles will not, by any means, be duplicating
what they are trying to do in terms of the politics, culture
and values of the cities in which they appear. The sense of
"alternative" that means offering a different perspective
in the community will, to a significant extent, be gone.
For the moment, such a drastic shift is not measurable in
the numbers, and apparently is not occurring. Whether that
situation changes will be an important barometer measuring
urban culture.
Click
here to view footnotes for this section.
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