Notes from the Underground

Alternative papers grow up

The "Food & Drink" supplement ran to 48 glossy pages, bubbling with four-color national liquor ads and articles on such pressing concerns as "Fighting the Gourmet Blues" and "A Consumer Guide to Cognac." An insert in the Sunday New York Times? A section in Gourmet magazine? No, just a little light reading from that old, radical, worker-owned collective in Boston, the Real Paper.

The Real Paper is no longer radical and no longer collective, and neither are most of the nation's other so-called alternative, or underground, newspapers. Ten years after Woodstock-and nearly a quarter-century after the Village Voice was launched as an alternative to New York City's conventional dailies-the alternative press has become so established that it is very nearly Establishment itself. Gone for the most part are the radical polemics, scatological prose and serendipitously amateur design that were staples of underground journalism. In their place are entertainment listings, movie and record reviews, consumer buying guides, elegant graphics, ads, ads, ads and more ads-for stereo equipment, records, furniture, sporting goods, liquor and other trophies of the good life.

Alternative newspapers have grown old with their original audience, the postwar baby-boom generation now moving into its 30s. At Denver's Straight Creek Journal and Seattle's Weekly, the average reader's age is 35. "Politics doesn't sell on the front page since Viet Nam," says Bruce Brugmann, 43, editor and publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian (circ. 35,000). "We put politics on the front page, but we have to highlight it with where to find the best sandwich."

Even before the quest for the best replaced muckraking as front-page material, it was difficult to define alternative newspapers. In size, they range from the Village Voice (circ. 170,000), to the Straight Creek Journal (circ. 5,500). Most of the 40 papers (combined circulation 1.5 million) in the year-old National Association of Alternative Newsweeklies are tabloids serving urban areas. But at least one is a full-size broadsheet (Willamette Week in Portland, Ore.), and others are statewide (Maine Times), suburban (Pacific Sun in Marin County, Calif.), rural (California's Mendocino Grapevine) and even insular (Maui Sun).

The alternatives have always tried to cover the news in a more analytical way than the conventional press. Their editors see themselves as subjective, irreverent and at odds with the local power structure. The Bay Guardian, for instance, rails regularly at Pacific Gas and Electric, the two San Francisco dailies, the " Mannattanization" of the city's architecture, the Chamber of Commerce and anything else it considers high or mighty. The alternatives also like to feature unknown writers and publish long, idiosyncratic articles. The Chicago Reader once printed a 19,000-word piece on beekeeping.

Investigative reporting and imaginative writing linger on, but most major alternative weeklies are becoming bastions of bourgeois buck chasing. Boston's weekly Phoenix (paid circulation 68,000, free distribution 50,000) averages 150 pages, promotes itself exuberantly on radio and television, and grossed $4 million last year; its publisher drives a counterrevolutionary Rolls-Royce. The rival Real Paper (48,000 paid, 57,000 free) is owned by a former state legislator, a corporate lawyer, and a Rockefeller heir. Chicago's

Reader (free circ. 97,000) now regularly runs to more than 100 ad-rich pages a week, and grossed almost $2 million in 1978. Ad revenues at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Reader (no relation) were up 410% in 1977 and 298% last year. Seattle's Weekly (circ. 15,000) won a contract to print the program for the visiting King Tut exhibit, and the Ithaca (N. Y.) Times and the local Chamber of Commerce collaborate to publish a calendar every summer. There is even an alternative chain: the Times/Advocate Newspapers, with papers serving western Massachusetts (circ. 85,000), New Haven and Hartford, Conn, (each 75,000), and Syracuse (40,000). Launched in 1973 with a $3,000 investment, the group last year grossed $3.25 million.

Alternative papers have become so respectable that some of their editors are beginning to feel uneasy. Says Mike Lene-han, 30, associate editor of the Chicago Reader: "As we've become more professional, we don't stoop so low-but we don't soar as often either." At the National Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' annual convention last month at Boston's elegant Parker House, the nonstop chatter about special advertising sections and "upscale demographics" finally touched off a flurry of selfcriticism. "I get this vision of [readers as] some sort of sausage, into which you jam all the consumer goods you can," said Village Voice Columnist Alexander Cockburn. On the final afternoon of the three-day affair, the delegates rather selfconsciously voted to insert "alternative" into the association's name. IF. Stone, the archetype of maverick journalists, picked up on their discomfiture in his keynote speech that night: "I understand you have qualms about being called alternatives, and after looking at your papers, I must say you've got the most bland kind of alternative. You don't try to change the world, you just titillate it."

Most of the editors present thought Stone was overstating things a bit, but few doubted that alternatives had drifted dangerously far from their original purpose, that perhaps they were betting too heavily on special sections and entertainment guides and not enough on investigative reporting and all-round hell raising. "You have to create a product that no one else can duplicate," warned the Bay Guardian 's Brugmann. "If you're sitting on your ass, thinking that you can make it on listings or a couple of entertainment articles, you're going to be out of business."

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