We Were Alt Before Alt Was Cool

We try to walk a thin line between insiderish media news and more general interest material around this particular joint. The blog is our way of letting you sorta get inside the office here at The Rake. You've got the magazine already, so we try not to repeat ourselves too much. (If you don't have the magazine, well, what are you waiting for? Subscribe!)

This might be a little too insiderish for you, but it's interesting to us. And if you bear with us for a second, we'll make it all come back to—what else?—the new issue now out on the web, on the street on Monday.

Today, the Boston Globe reports that the people who own Boston Magazine have bought The Weekly Dig. The Dig is a new alt-weekly competing with the venerable Phoenix, the forty-year-old behemoth of Beantown. The sub-text of this purchase and the expected rivalry is this: The alternative press has not aged very gracefully. It has tried to grow old with the readership that made it rich—younger babyboomers and older Gen-Xers (forgive us for using these threadbare terms, but you know what we mean). But that readership doesn't honestly need to be told what the hottest local band is, nor for whom to vote, nor the entrenched inequities of our free-market system. There is a new generation of non-cynical, non-jaded readers to be reached (twenty somethings, "Generation Y," yo!) but they aren't as attractive to advertisers. It is too painful for publishers to adjust the editorial product to a younger readership; there's no money in it.

That, at least, seems to be the assumption of Stephen Mindich, the legendary publisher of the Phoenix, because he's been hearing it from smart observers for, oh, about ten years. (Hearing it and believing it are two different things: Everyone has been saying this about the alternative press for years, and as far as we can tell, the only person who has done anything about it is Tim Keck at the Stranger.)

Anyway, Mindich responds defensively to the news, saying, ""The Boston maggies are coming to get me. Why? Because we are too old. I am too old. Our editor is too old. Give me a break! Herb Lipson has got to be 75."

If we had to guess, we'd counsel Mindich thus: It probably has not much to do with being too old, and more to do with being too rich. Even though the editorial product of the alt weeklies has stagnated, they've proven for years that it simply doesn't matter. (Just like federal deficits don't matter!) They have merely followed the money—away from readers and toward advertisers.

So what does this have to do with the new issue of The Rake? Well, we think the rise and stall of Eric Utne is a very good metaphor for the alternative press itself. Money has never been the issue, it's been about vision. If you want to relive the moment when the alternative press stood at the threshold of editorial de-evolution, you can read all about it right here. —The Editor in Cheese