What Tune Does the Utne Play?
By Michael Riley/Minneapolis
Too many magazines are like microwave cheeseburgers: quick, convenient and bland. Yet one quirky exception has been eminently successful at putting spice in the American reading diet: the Utne Reader, an alternative Reader's Digest stuffed with provocative articles gleaned mostly from the country's left- < leaning and fringe press. Founded six years ago, the Minneapolis-based bimonthly has become a handbook for baby boomers, new agers and whole earthers, as well as the odd eclectic middle-of-the-roader. Says television essayist Bill Moyers, an inveterate reader: "I wish I had invented it. It's sort of like an underground railroad of ideas."
And on something of a fast track. In a brutal economic climate for magazines, Utne Reader's circulation has tripled in the past three years, to 204,000, making it one of the nation's fastest growing periodicals. Ad pages climbed more than 160% over the same period. The Reader hawks products like Birkenstock sandals, Gevalia coffee and "socially responsible" mutual funds while banning alcohol ads.
"We aspire to be the chronicle of the emerging culture," says editor in chief Eric Utne (it rhymes with chutney and means, roughly, "far out" in his ancestral Norwegian). To meet that goal, Utne and his small band of editors sift through nearly 3,000 fringe publications stuffed on shelves and in wire bins in their cozy offices in a bohemian corner of downtown Minneapolis. They peruse the conservative American Spectator and the Match!, a magazine for anarchists; Processed World, a journal for dissident office workers; and such mainstream periodicals as Esquire in an effort to splice together chronicles of new trends and ideas. Samples of recent reprintings include an article calling for a third political party from the Progressive and a piece from the New Republic on why the rich get richer. "We want to challenge people's shibboleths," says Utne. "We're not out to tweak people, but we do want to stretch them."
Like his magazine, Utne, 44, is a bundle of creative contradictions. A St. Paul native, he bemoans the fare on television yet is a fan of thirtysomething. He pays half of staffers' bus fares but drives to work himself. After a false start in architecture school, he started work as an ad director with East West Journal in Brookline, Mass. He left in 1974 to help start another alternative publication, New Age Journal. After a stint as a Manhattan literary agent, Utne returned to Minneapolis and started the Reader as a newsletter, which soon blossomed into a hefty 128-page digest.
The magazine was nominated two years ago for a National Magazine Award, and Utne has plans to increase circulation to 500,000 by 1995. The readers are the kind that advertisers slaver over -- average household income nearly $70,000, 80% college graduates and 62% professionals or managers -- but success carries an inevitable cost. Some of the magazine's early quirkiness is gone, and a few signs of middle-age complacency are appearing. Although Esprit clothing ads have not yet overwhelmed plugs for homeopathic remedies, the Reader is almost obsessive in its baby boomerism, with recent covers on dream houses, good schools and growing old. Some critics now call the Reader smug, self- satisfied, a bit too yuppified, and say it has sacrificed some edge to gain a broader audience. "There's a big chance they will lose their identity," says Samir A. Husni, a University of Mississippi associate journalism professor and magazine watcher. It sounds like the kind of thirtysomething problem that publisher Utne, on his TV-watching days, might appreciate.