Seattle's Mall-ternative Newsweeklies
A couple years back, before we'd been thoroughly disabused of the notion that a future existed in pecking out stories for a living, we were in talks with a local fashion boutique that was seeking freelancers. They needed local writers to churn out a couple stories on hip clothes and NW lifestyle (or something to that effect -- honestly, we don't remember) for an ad supplement they planned to publish in Seattle's "underground newspaper," the Stranger.
We remember screwing up our face in righteous disgust at that appellation, but kudos to Tim Keck & Co.: almost 20 years after Keck -- then a student at University of Wisconsin-Madison -- sold his share of The Onion to move to Seattle and start his own alt-weekly, the Stranger still manages to convince enough people it's "underground" that a boutique store will cough up $2,000+ per four-color page to publish an ad supplement to bask in the perceived indie cred.
The alternative newsweekly, though, is a beast in search of direction. Mark Fitzgerald, the editor-at-large for the industry journal Editor & Publisher recently weighed in on the floundering alt-weekly market, noting, "As the oldest of them push past 40, alternative newspapers are still trying to figure out what they're going to be when they grow up."
"As we researched this month's cover story," writes Fitzgerald (the cover story on alt-weeklies is subscriber-only):
...my colleague Jennifer Saba and I were reminded there's a class war going on in the alternative press. Alternative papers are moving in several different directions -- and they all have something snide to say about where the other guy is going. This is an intramural contest among papers that consider themselves the "real" alternatives, not those free papers created by mainstream dailies they dismiss as "faux alternatives."
True enough. the Stranger has spilled no shortage of ink bashing the hell out of the Weekly, which has been in what seems steady decline. the Stranger was rapidly approaching their circulation when SW's parent company, Village Voice Media, was purchased by the New Times Co. As the Stranger delighted in reporting, New Times -- which owned around a dozen weeklies around the country -- was a conservative corporate affair. Their papers lacked a lot of local color and instead were meant to appeal to travelers, who need to know exactly where to go to find local hooker listings.
New Times purged the Weekly of long-time staffers and replaced them with fresh faces who seemed to know for shit about Seattle. True, we all find the "Ask an Uptight Seattleite" column to be apt, if rather uninspired. But for all the Weekly's new-found willingness to bash the locals, their attempt to re-establish a reader-base has hit no shortage of snags.
Newly-former staff writer Huan Hsu initiated a seeming race to the bottom. Back in April he started the trend by attacking Real Change's newspaper vendors for not being homeless. But it was sex--the nastier and raunchier the better -- that did him in. On May 16 he wrote an article about dirty-dancing high schoolers. On June 13 was the now-infamous story about a Ballard High School tennis coach and his pseudo-spiritual sexuality, shared with his teenage female wards. Despite the grotesque pun in the title ("Break Point: Ballard High School's New Age Tennis Coach and the Bad News Beavers"), the article led to the coach's dismissal and seemed to vindicate the teen girl navel gazing. On July 11, Hsu wrote a pseudo-environmental piece about new-agey sex-toy sellers protesting phthalates in dildos. Then there was the July 25 attempt at muckraking that recounted wacky, disgusting and lewd stories of Metro Transit buses. But the final nail in Hsu's coffin was the bottom-of-the-barrel Aug. 8 cover story about NW "cougars." Since that story appeared, Hsu has disappeared from the Weekly's masthead.
the Stranger didn't quite seem to know how to spin the story. On Aug. 8, news editor Josh Feit posted a brief announcement on the Slog stating simply that, "Seattle Weekly staff writer Huan Hsu (rhymes with "who?") has left the paper after a brief 5-month stint." No doubt Stranger staffers would have loved to make an issue of Hsu's dismissal [Note: It has come to our attention since this post was published that it was inaccurate and misleading to characterize Mr. Hsu's leaving the Weekly as a "dismissal"; by all accounts he left of his own volition to pursue writing a book. We regret the error. Furthermore, as has been suggested by both outside commenters and other Seattlest contributors, it is potentially unfair to hold Mr. Hsu solely accountable for the subject of his articles, as the editors of Seattle Weekly played an unknown but no doubt decisive decision-making role in the process.] following the story, but they're hardly in a position to talk: their editor Dan Savage made his name as the louche sex columnist behind "Savage Love." the Stranger postures as radical, but its success lies in its status as the go-to source for upscale urbanites -- hipster and yuppie alike -- with their cherished disposable income (hence the fashion boutique paying outrageous ad rates). On the whole, the quality of their writing seems to have plateaued. Since Sandeep Kaushik -- their excellent former political reporter -- left to serve as a spokesperson for King County Executive Ron Sims, the Stranger has struggled to maintain quality. Charles Mudede, growing international reputation notwithstanding, remains hit and miss at best. Half of his articles are incomprehensible or pointless (why exactly did the Stranger need a half-baked obit/101-course on Jacques Derrida?) while the other half remain almost unbearably pretentious. While Arts Editor Christopher Frizelle remains an accomplished writer, he doesn't seem to bother with it much, which is probably why he's earned the enmity of a number of artists in Seattle by taking the Stranger's hipper-than-thou attitude to new heights. We don't condone bowing to the pressure of fetishizing the local, but when you're being snubbed by a man wearing an ugly second-hand tie with an untucked button-down and a jauntily angled cap, you could perhaps be forgiven for assuming that an arts editor's job should require serious engagement with the arts rather than being a behind-the-curve hipster genuflecting at the increasingly irrelevant altar of Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's crowd.
Radical chic pretensions aside, the Stranger well represents its demographic, which is not nearly as flattering a political position as they might expect. Yes, they do a great job of covering gay issues, and even have the occasional article by iconic gay conservative Andrew Sullivan. But these days that's not particularly radical. As Sullivan himself wrote in a good piece in The New Republic a couple years back:
For the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every summer in the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. It has long attracted artists, writers, the offbeat, and the bohemian; and, for many years now, it has been to gay America what Oak Bluffs in Martha's Vineyard is to black America: a place where a separate identity essentially defines a separate place. No one bats an eye if two men walk down the street holding hands, or if a lesbian couple pecks each other on the cheek, or if a drag queen dressed as Cher careens down the main strip on a motor scooter. It's a place, in that respect, that is sui generis. Except that it isn't anymore. As gay America has changed, so, too, has Provincetown. In a microcosm of what is happening across this country, its culture is changing.As the gay community becomes more diverse, and potentially more conservative, it's impossible not to ask how far the editors of the Stranger will follow them to the right. It's not as simple as Dems vs. Republicans; it's a question of political values. In the devastating wake of the 2004 Presidential election, the Stranger published its famous "Urban Archipelago" cover, which in stark terms laid out an us-and-them world-view that celebrated cities as progressive and dynamic centers of culture and the economy, while deriding the conservative rural and ex-urban areas as backwards, regressive, socially conservative and essentially populated by ignorants. A salve for wounded pride, perhaps, but as far as progressive politics go, it's anything but: as Thomas Frank has argued, the logic behind this sort of argument is regressive and reactionary and not nearly as liberal and progressive as its advocates like to think.Some of these changes are obvious. A real-estate boom has made Provincetown far more expensive than it ever was, slowly excluding poorer and younger visitors and residents. Where, once, gayness trumped class, now the reverse is true. Beautiful, renovated houses are slowly outnumbering beach shacks, once crammed with twenty-something, hand-to-mouth misfits or artists. The role of lesbians in the town's civic and cultural life has grown dramatically, as it has in the broader gay world. The faces of people dying from or struggling with aids have dwindled to an unlucky few. The number of children of gay couples has soared, and, some weeks, strollers clog the sidewalks. Bar life is not nearly as central to socializing as it once was. Men and women gather on the beach, drink coffee on the front porch of a store, or meet at the Film Festival or Spiritus Pizza.
There's an argument that would hold that the Stranger has no obligation to follow someone like Frank's logic, which argues for inclusiveness and alliances of common interest between the working class Red State voters and white collar urban liberals. the Stranger, after all, is a local newspaper. But its editors fancy themselves national actors. Witness Dan Savage's recent literary output, including such raunchy titles as The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family.
Don't get us wrong -- the stories of gay parents like Savage are increasingly part of our culture and they need to be told. We just don't think you can have it both ways; there's a natural age limit to hipness, and parenthood remains the antidote to hipness, despite the pathetic attempts of writers like Neal Pollack to deconstruct the paradigm. It's not radical, in other words, to desperately drag your hipness through all your life changes; it's juvenile and sophomoric. There's nothing quite as sad as a poorly aging hipster, and that means the Stranger either needs to grow up (and risk going down the same road the Weekly did with its gradual slide into irrelevance during the Village Voice Media years), or Keck needs to skip that phase entirely, ax half his staff and bring in a new crowd of crazy young radicals to reinvigorate the paper.
E&P's Fitzgerald could have been referring specifically to Seattle when he wrote:
Like many another baby boomer watching his belly spill over the waistband of his Relaxed Fit 550 Levi's, part of the alternative press despairs that its g-g-generation has lost its fire and become exactly the complacent middle-class American booboisie it loathed. Meanwhile, another, and growing, part of the alt-press scorns those one-time pioneers as nostalgia-befogged, aged hippies who squandered their youth on empty indulgence when they should have been fully funding their IRAs and celebrating their final mortgage payments with appletinis.The flip-side is also true: the aging Baby Boomers have good reason to sneer down at the poorly aging hipsters trying to find a balance between bong hits and parenthood, and lash out at the hypocrisy and intellectual confusion of high-end consumer papers posing as indie rags taking on the man. Then again, maybe the entire problem is us, the readers: why is it that we fall for the "alternative" posturing of free weekly newspapers owned by rich people (Keck) or huge corporations (New Times), that make bank by printing 60%-70% ad-based rags for business travelers in need of cocktails and a cheap trick?
Image: "Window to 2004" by Grundlepuck, from the Seattlest Flickr pool.
Comments [rss]
-
seandr
-
Cato the Younger Younger
-
Katelyn
-
Gomez
-
sciencevsromance
-
guest
-
MvB
-
guest
-
Cato the Younger Younger
-
guest
-
Charles
-
guest
-
Jeremy
-
Seth
-
guest
-
kasa
-
sciencevsromance
