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The Village Voice, the first and most famous alternative weekly newspaper, met its demise in September 2017. Founded in 1955, it had a legendary and boisterous record of publishing the sorts of things mainstream media refused to touch: explorations of subcultures beneath the notice of the average New Yorker, profiles of up-and-coming artists and neighborhood characters, as well as history-making investigations. It was the only paper to publish on-the-ground coverage of the 1969 Stonewall riots. It ran arts criticism, underground comics, plus classified ads for people seeking cheap apartments, new bandmates, and missed connections.
The Voice spawned a host of imitators across the US, not just in big liberal cities like Chicago and San Francisco, but also in smaller, more conservative towns like Cincinnati, Little Rock, and Salt Lake City. The other alts improved upon the Voice in some ways—they were free, they sponsored community events, they published listings of cultural events—but they served the same essential function: if you wanted to know what was really going on, you picked up the alt-weekly.
In the nineties, alt-weeklies were practically printing money. Then, in the early aughts, Craigslist appeared, and revenue from classified ads vanished. As the larger industry suffered losses from digital media, the great recession of 2008, and the 2020 pandemic, so too did the alts. Many of them lost their independence and passed from owner to owner, growing thinner and thinner, until they were finally put to bed. Rest in power, Boston Phoenix (d. 2013), San Francisco Bay Guardian (d. 2014), Philadelphia City Paper (d. 2015), Baltimore City Paper (d. 2017), Minneapolis City Pages (d. 2020), and St. Louis Riverfront Times (d. 2024).
When the Voice passed, what felt like an entire generation of writers who’d started their careers honing their voice at alt-weeklies produced obituaries for the entire genre. (And, possibly, their youth.) But in many places around the country, like Cincinnati, Little Rock, Salt Lake City, and dozens of other cities and towns, the alts have survived.
“There’s a lazy and incorrect narrative out there that alt-weeklies are dying,” says Jimmy Boegle, the president of AAN Publishers (formerly the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) and also the publisher of the Reno News & Review and the Coachella Valley Independent in Palm Springs, California. “We’re facing the same challenges that the dailies are and other legacy media are, but there are still a lot of very healthy alternative publications doing amazing work out there.”
To survive, alt-weeklies have had to evolve. Several years ago, AAN expanded its membership beyond general-interest papers to include LGBTQ, Black, Latinx, and other niche publications; consequently, AAN currently has a membership of 120 papers, its largest since 2009. Some AAN publications no longer publish weekly; some have dispensed with print and publish daily online. Some no longer use the label “alternative,” having taken the place of local dailies that went out of business. (Boegle also points out that the term “alternative” has been co-opted by the far right, never a constituency represented in alt-weeklies.)
In a crucial way, though, these papers are an alternative—now to publications owned by large conglomerates that fill their pages with wire service copy and AI slop instead of news about the towns and cities they ostensibly cover.
The editors and staff of these papers are committed to covering their local communities, whether those are entire towns or enclaves within those towns. Most are locally owned and -operated, and funded by local advertisers. That means they have a distinct point of view. At a time when public trust in national media is slipping, readers put greater trust in their local papers. In smaller cities, the local paper might be staffed by people readers know personally.
The other thing they have in common is that they are still free.
“I do think now the lines are less clear between what is alternative and what is not,” says Judy Davidoff, editor and president of Isthmus in Madison, Wisconsin. “What we see today in a lot of news coverage is what the alts really pioneered in the seventies, which is not the he said/she said journalism, but really digging deeper, having a voice, researching the facts, but then presenting what you find—not just competing quotes and sources, but really getting to the bottom of a topic or an issue.”
Marianne Partridge, editor in chief of the Santa Barbara Independent—which she cofounded in 1986 after a stint as editor of the Village Voice—has always refused to consider her paper an alternative. For her, “alternative” exists in opposition to something else. “I just wanted to think of ourselves as a paper,” she says.
Partridge has a point. Currently, the Independent is the only newspaper in the town of Santa Barbara. (There are several other newspapers in the county.) In the alt-weekly tradition, it takes its cues from the personality of the town. The nature of Santa Barbara is not cutting-edge the way downtown Manhattan was. The real estate section that Partridge initially considered a terrible idea turned out to be very popular among readers. But so are the in-depth coverage of local government and the arts scene and the arts and culture calendar, the largest in the area. All of these things have always been the hallmarks of an alt-weekly.
Dallas Voice, by contrast, is part of a larger media landscape with several papers (including another alt-weekly, the Dallas Observer), but its main focus, says Leo Cusimano, its publisher, president, and CEO, is to serve the city’s LGBTQ community. “Print is still king in the gay community because of discrimination out there,” he says. “The community likes to pick up the paper and see who advertises so they can support those advertisers.”
Niche media outlets like Dallas Voice, Cusimano believes, cover their communities far more comprehensively than mass media, and readers feel they can trust them more. Dallas Voice has become an integral part of the LGBTQ community, both as an advocate and as a chronicler of its history.
In the eighties and nineties, for example, the paper published obituaries every week of people who had died of complications from AIDS and HIV. One week in the mid-nineties, after more than a decade, there were no obituaries to run. The staff was stunned. “That moment will live with me forever,” Cusimano says. “Because it wasn’t just about not printing an obit. It was about survival. It was about progress. It was about a community starting to breathe again.” Readers still remember that issue, he says, and how hopeful it made them feel. Years later, Dallas Voice was the first paper in Dallas to publish announcements of same-sex marriages.
The loyalty these papers have inspired within their communities may be the reason for their survival over the past five years.
Paula Routly cofounded Seven Days in Burlington, Vermont, in 1995; the paper is still distributed everywhere within a ninety-minute radius. It has the largest circulation of any paper in the state. Prior to the pandemic, Seven Days was known for its ambitious reporting and writing, and for providing comprehensive coverage of the arts and of the local food scene. It maintained a thriving personals section, a rarity these days. But Routly, currently publisher, editor in chief, and co-owner of the paper along with sixteen other staffers, never felt a need to forge a personal connection with readers until the pandemic, when she began writing weekly letters from the publisher about what was happening behind the scenes at the paper and also sharing more intimate stories, like the death of her mother. Readers responded.
“We’d had a Super Reader [donation] program before the pandemic,” she says. “We felt sort of awkward asking people to support us. But we finally had a reason to ask them—we actually needed their support, and they responded. It has changed our business model.” Now donations make up about 5 percent of Seven Days’ revenue.
The problem for these papers isn’t attracting readers, although most evidence for the steady readership is anecdotal. Cathy Resmer, the deputy publisher of Seven Days, reports that she drove a circulation route last December, when one of the regular drivers was out for the holidays, where she distributed 1,340 papers and brought back just 19 from the previous week. And Boegle says that while print circulation may have decreased for some papers, they’re making up for it with online readership, though Cusimano notes that clicks tend to fluctuate depending on what kind of stories the paper is publishing.
Instead, the problem is finding the funds to keep publishing. For Cusimano, the key to survival lies in diversifying revenue streams. Dallas Voice has been doing video (called DVtv) since 2005, not just for its own website, but for paying clients who can use the footage to promote their own organizations. It does social media management and produces branded content. Event sponsorship is also important: an annual Best Of issue accompanied by a party to celebrate honorees is practically de rigueur for an alt-weekly, but Seven Days also hosts the Vermont Tech Jam, a career and tech expo, and the Independent sponsors a local baseball team. In addition, the Independent gives out annual awards for theater productions and “local heroes,” members of the community who might otherwise be overlooked.
Isthmus changed its business model altogether. The paper nearly went under during the pandemic, but Davidoff and three other editors offered to take over and transition it into a nonprofit, with help from a reader donation program set up by the former owners. It took seventeen months to resume print operations, during which the staff and freelancers worked on a volunteer basis. Being a nonprofit would, in theory, make Isthmus eligible for more grants. (Dallas Voice and Seven Days have received funding from Press Forward and Report for America, respectively.) But, as Davidoff notes, “no one really wants to just fund operations. They want special projects that offer transformation of the industry. It’s very hard to put together that kind of grant proposal when you’re already working so many hours a day just getting your content out.”
Partridge, meanwhile, has never considered making the Independent a nonprofit, largely because the rules governing tax-exempt papers forbid them from making political endorsements, something she sees as an essential function of a newspaper.
“To be a local publication, you must drill into the community and be part of it,” Partridge says. “Otherwise, it’s not a local publication. It’s only reporting on things like a foreign correspondent. You have to have that love of the community that you’re in and a belief that you can be part of the web that holds the community together.”
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