Alternative Papers : Weeklies--Subscribing to Change

In their maiden issue last summer, the editors of Washington’s new alternative newspaper, the Washington Weekly, were quite plain about their vision of the future of the alternative press in America.

One story, entitled “Tips for Summer Lawyers,” advised readers to “always wear a vest” and told them that “pleasing partners is your job.” Another piece, dubbed “Fashion Dressing By Zip Code,” recommended “green pants and whale belts in Georgetown (20007) . . . and ethno-peasant in Mt. Pleasant (20009).”

Perhaps the strongest case was the cover story on picking “The Right Church,” or something called “ecclesiastical ladder-climbing. . . . Working the aisles on Sunday as a way of getting a leg up on the competition or finding a suitable mate is acknowledged by churchgoers,” the story explained. “In Washington’s more status-conscious circles, dogma takes a back seat to more earthly pursuits.”

Mixed Results

Although the Washington Weekly may pursue its brand of journalism with rare abandon--and so far with mixed results--the theory behind such stories is indicative of changes facing alternative weekly papers elsewhere as well.

Today, the same audience that read the radical weekly press in the 1960s and the culture-entertainment weeklies of the late 1970s--the baby boom generation--is getting older, moving to the suburbs and becoming more concerned with children, taxes and zoning ordinances.

The change is posing special problems for an industry that has carved a niche in the last decade by catering to just this group. In reaction, some older papers--including the L.A. Weekly--are trying to find ways of keeping their existing readers while attracting a new generation of younger urban readers.

New Hybrid Papers

At the same time, many of the most interesting new weeklies are locating in suburbs--hybrids of the hip alternative urban weeklies of the ‘70s and the traditional suburban community weeklies dominated by news of local city councils, Rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops.

And some new papers, such as the Washington Weekly, are pursuing the baby boom audience as “Yuppies” or “Yummies”--Redbook magazine’s term for “Young Upwardly Mobile Mommies”--turning their journals into something far from the radical politics in which alternative weeklies were born. “Most of you . . . have been through a divisive war, campus rebellion and sexual revolution,” Washington Weekly Editor Jeff Stein wrote in the first issue. Today, “we sweat for a good job.”

In Los Angeles, some believe that changes in the baby boom generation could reignite competition between the thick and profitable Weekly and the lagging Reader. Although it dominates in advertising, the seven-year-old L.A. Weekly is planning major changes in the next year in part because of changes in its audience. It will de-emphasize political coverage, develop a more irreverent tone and institute new graphics. It already has started a suburban edition.

On the other side of Hollywood, the thinner L.A. Reader deems it significant that it has a better educated, more affluent readership, and at least one newspaper group has tried to buy the Reader.

Most weeklies had their roots in the radical press of the 1960s. The most profitable weekly, for instance, the Boston Phoenix, was founded in 1966, but, by the early ‘70s, was one of the first weeklies emphasizing life style and entertainment reporting. By the late 1970s, it had overcome and eventually acquired its competition, Boston’s The Real Paper.

Through the decade, similar weeklies were begun in Chicago, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego and elsewhere. Although all reflected the idiosyncrasies of their towns and owners, all emphasized similar ingredients: entertainment listings, classified advertising, ads from small merchants and cultural, local and sometimes investigative reporting.

Dailies More ‘Regional’

“Because the daily papers have become so regional, serving large geographic areas, they wind up losing touch with a lot of smaller advertisers and smaller interest groups,” Pasadena Weekly Editor James Vowell said.

“We are able to exist in Pasadena,” Vowell said, “because the Los Angeles Times doesn’t pay an inordinate amount of attention to Pasadena, and the Pasadena Star-News can’t be as local as we can. They’re caught in the middle.”

Both Los Angeles weeklies were founded in 1978. The Weekly had its roots more directly in the radical press. Editor and founder Jay Levin had recently joined the once-radical Los Angeles Free Press when owner Larry Flynt closed the paper in 1977. Levin regrouped, found investors and started the Weekly as a cross between “High Times and Newsweek.”

The L.A. Reader, in contrast, is an offspring of the Reader newspaper in Chicago, a 14-year-old weekly so successful that it demands that most advertisers pay their bills in advance.

After seven years, the Weekly is winning the derby for Los Angeles by a wide margin.

The Weekly averages 130 pages per issue, for example, but the Reader is closer to 40. Although Levin is making enough money to start a new monthly entertainment magazine called Style, the Reader has lost an estimated $2.5 million since it started, and some say it will lose roughly $400,000 in 1985. The Reader will not release financial data, but Publisher Thomas J. Rehwaldt, who supervises the paper from Chicago, said those numbers are too high.

Different explanations exist for why the Weekly has come out on top. The simplest is that the Weekly emphasized entertainment coverage, while the Reader put out much the same kind of paper that it did in Chicago. But Vowell, former editor of the Reader, said an internal study conducted by the paper last year showed that, in the first nine months of 1984, the Weekly and Reader had exactly the same proportion of different kinds of news--except the Weekly had much more of everything.

A more complex explanation is that the Weekly, run by its owners on borrowed money, was far more aggressive in its stories and its business practices. “The major reason we made it is that we worked for our advertisers,” Levin said.

In contrast, the Reader “tended to be more laid back,” Rehwaldt conceded. “We didn’t appreciate the value of an aggressive sales force for a long time.”

But Rehwaldt says that the Reader’s passivity will change from now on. For example, he makes much of the fact that new 1984 market surveys show that the Reader has more affluent demographics than the Weekly. The median household income of his paper’s readers was $41,000, and the Weekly’s was about $30,000, he said.

Rehwaldt believes that those demographics mean that the Reader is preferred by the kind of affluent baby boomer now considered so important in weekly journalism, and he hopes that this may lead to an important second chance for the Reader. The Weekly is vulnerable because it has not yet attracted major chain retailers, as have successful weeklies in other cities, Rehwaldt believes, in large part because it has not yet achieved the right audience.

Although Levin calls the Reader “a very minor factor,” he is planning changes of his own, and the reason again has much to do with the changing nature of his readers and his interest in attracting the very advertisers that Rehwaldt is talking about.

“In some ways, I haven’t kept up with my audience, my peer group,” said Levin, who said his own interests have kept such issues as American involvement in Latin America a major subject in the Weekly. “I’m not interested in real estate. I’m not a Yuppie.”

Levin did not detail his plans but said that the national and global political issues the left-leaning Weekly has followed on its cover will be done “with shorter pieces inside” and that the paper will “move on to other stuff.”

Political cover stories will drop from one every four issues to one every six, Levin said, and even then will concern local, not international, issues. In addition, the tone will become less strident. “We’re not irreverent enough,” he said.

As Adweek magazine so delicately put it, “LA Weekly Reaching Out To Yupscale Advertisers.”

This is not to say that the Weekly or the Reader plan to follow the strategy of the Washington Weekly and turn the papers unashamedly into a guide to materialism, social climbing and career tips. Many weekly editors cringe at the thought.

Rather than changing weeklies to aim at Yuppies, what Rehwaldt, Levin and others are describing is striking a balance between retaining the existing older readers and still attracting a new generation of younger persons.

Those younger readers are essential because they are the kind of urban residents who will respond best to the entertainment listings that are the backbone of most urban weeklies, publishers said. Those older readers are essential because they are large in number and can attract new advertising from major department stores.

Others, however, are skeptical. “I think the sophisticated inner-city weekly is dying,” said Stephen Cummings, publisher of the Tab Newspapers, a chain of five weeklies near Boston.

The Tab papers, which Cummings founded in 1979 with two partners, are among the first of what might be called the suburban hybrid weekly, a category of paper that he believes eventually will supplant the urban weekly of the 1970s.

Papers like the Tab, or the Pasadena Weekly locally, combine characteristics of the urban weeklies and the traditional rural and suburban community newspaper.

For example, the Tab papers boast the slick, full-color sophisticated look of their urban predecessors, as well as arts reviews, entertainment and cultural reporting. But the political coverage concerns such matters as local schools, taxes and how to get abatements.

The Boston experience is no anomaly. A similar paper was started in Palo Alto in 1979 after the Tribune Co. of Chicago bought two small daily papers in Palo Alto and Redwood City and tried to merge them into a regional paper.

Threat to Urban Weeklies

Cummings believes that the suburban hybrids threaten urban weeklies because they offer much the same alternative to advertisers that the urban papers do, as well as the same alternative local journalism, but have a more stable and affluent audience.

In Boston, for example, the Tab papers together carry 600% more Bloomingdales advertising than even the Boston Globe, in large part because the primary Bloomingdales store is situated in the Tab circulation area.

Los Angeles attorney Pierce O’Donnell founded the Weekly in Pasadena and a separate edition in nearby Altadena in January, 1984. In the first year, O’Donnell said, advertising revenues were 22% ahead of what he had projected, and now O’Donnell and his partners are planning to expand circulation in the next few months to Sierra Madre, Arcadia and La Canada-Flintridge. He said he is also “seriously considering” a new paper in Orange County and “a major new weekly in L.A.” aimed again at the magical baby-boom market and circulating through Glendale, Burbank, downtown and the Wilshire Corridor.

Whether O’Donnell can make good on his plans or not, the changes in the weeklies audience poses a challenge for America’s alternative weekly press.

“In weeklies, if you get too far ahead, too avant-garde, you lose your audience,” Boston Phoenix Publisher Steven Mindich said. “And, if you get too far behind, you can also lose.”