So, how important is your alterna-weekly these days?

What the man said. A true genius.

aw, bless

In Portsmouth, NH we have a weekly paper (The Wire) that regularly sponsors or kickstarts local events. They profile visiting artists, but the locals get at least as much coverage. Granted, it's a small paper for a small town, so just getting a club night together can seem like a big deal. But they also organized a "write and record an album in 28 days" event this past February that drew over 220 artists (with an amazing 75% completion rate). And they release 1-2 compilation CDs a year. It would be pretty fantastic if more small, mid-sized and even large cities had support like that.

i am all for supporting local acts when they're, you know, worth covering. journalism isn't the fucking special olympics, people.

IF YOU'RE TRYING TO TELL MY SPECIAL LITTLE GUY THAT HE CAN'T BE A JOURNALIST I'M GONNA FIND YOU AND MAKE YOU INTO A DELICIOUS FLESH SMOOTHIE.

the wire is fantastic. best alt weekly in new england by far. i wish the portland phoenix was more like it.

Plenty of cities have great local scenes. And think of it this way: if your alt-weekly ran some screed about George Bush or Iraq every week, and never paid attention to local gentrification, or problems with the mayor, or the lack of arts housing, or any other local story, would that constitute a good news section?

you gotta search the other stuff out, obviously. though it helps to live in a town with so many goddamn weirdos and a really strong urban music scene. (not to say that weirdos or rappers necessarily have more interesting stories [shit, the rapper's usually have more BORING stories] but still.)

it's true, the writing is generally really bad. (our own tim f being the one exception, and he's stuck in the dance section where it appears to be more about showing ten pages of people getting monged at clubs the week before.)

Believe it or not, a lot of people still don't have regular internet access. Those are the people who take our local weekly home and actually read it.

Still, our weekly is less important than it was, oh, ten years ago.

The NYPress is not fit for cage fodder, nor do I own a bird.

Jersey City doesn't really have an "alt-weekly," or rather, every month two new half-assed ones appear and two old half-assed ones cease to appear.

anyway, here's the deal: if said alt-weekly is running a "cliched article about radiohead coming to town" it's the editor's fault. (i mean, christ...just look at your examples.) there is a WORLD of music to cover out there, some of which might never even come to your town let alone play the same shitty rock clubs every weekend. does that somehow invalidate it? the idea that long (or short) form rock writing is some form of gig guide on steroids is one of the main reasons alt-weekly writing sucks so fucking much now. the fucking calendar is already there, as are the calendar highlights in whatever form they take in your local.

i never said covering local music wasn't important. but 52 weeks is a drop in the bucket to cover everything that's out there. baltimore has a GREAT local scene in some ways, and i've been pleased and privledged to cover it. but there has to be something there worthwhile to write about. and yeah, sorry kids, but your lame pixies rehash takes a backseat to villalobos or sublime frequencies iraqi folk comp or whatever. if, like everyone says, people only read it for the ads and the calendar listings (and shit, i'm not even really disputing that), well, those things are already there, so i might as well make the extraneous stuff (i.e. the writing) as interesting to as broad a range of people as i possibly can, whether it's lining the bird cage next week or not.

You lose. (Gustavo is both more politically aware and funnier than YOU'LL ever be, believe me.)

I don't think I know you, Ned.Maybe, Gustavo is more politically aware than I am,,but explain to me why. Is he joking when he says "Got any questions about Mexicans?" That's like saying: Got any questions about black people? or Got any questions about Asian people? Who is he targeting here? Who is he explaining Mexican culture to and why does there seem to be some assumption that Mexicans aren't reading the paper or something. I find that cartoon image with the gold tooth offensive. I do take sterotyping seriously.

Thus, if I type in 'Gustavo Arellano' into a search engine, I am given resources and websites. Why, like this one, a story in which there are words, among them:

Arellano, who is also the OC Weekly food editor, never fancied himself a newspaper columnist. The small-framed, quick-witted and admitted self-promoter had a vision of being a Harvard history professor by the time he was 26. "And I would've done it, too."

He was a film student at Chapman University in Orange when he began reading the OC Weekly. He wrote to its editor, Will Swaim, suggesting story ideas. Swaim was impressed and asked Arellano to write the stories himself.

Arellano resisted at first, but Swaim pressed him. Arellano began writing about the Orange County he knew, including school board politics and his family history in Anaheim, his hometown. Meanwhile, he entered graduate school at UCLA, where he earned a master's in Latin American studies.

As a reporter, Arellano, who calls himself a "good Catholic boy," aggressively covered the sexual abuse scandal in the Diocese of Orange and allegations of corruption against Orange County Latino activist Nativo V. Lopez. He also wrote one of the earliest profiles of Jim Gilchrist, the Aliso Viejo activist who began the border-watching Minuteman Project.

Arellano is driven by a strong sense of loyalty to Orange County. He describes it as the "Ellis Island of the 21st century," a place where a large immigrant population belies the myth of the county as a bastion of white conservatives and big-spending decadence.

"We didn't have to go outside of our little enclave to experience Mexican culture," Arellano said, recalling weekends of Mass attendance, girls' quinceañeras and relatives' baby showers.

....

The column was born when Swaim approached Arellano with an off-the-wall idea: Explain the humor behind a Spanish-language radio advertisement Swaim saw on the side of a bus. At first, Arellano saw the concept as an easy way to make readers chuckle. But in time he realized there was more to "Ask a Mexican" than that.

"The people who write in — they have this preconceived notion of what a Mexican is," Arellano said. "I answer their question, but in a way that's either going to flip the stereotype or going to explode it."

Similar to comedians who satirize their own cultures, including Dave Chappelle and Jeff Foxworthy, Arellano critiques the biases and prejudices of Mexicans and non-Mexicans equally. He freely draws attention to some of the nastier elements of Mexican culture, such as strains of sexism, homophobia and prejudices against other ethnic groups.

"I'm being exotic so that we can remember we're not exotic," Arellano said. "In any minority group, you're always going to have this stigma that you perpetuate on yourself. 'Oh, we're a minority, we're a minority.' My response is 'We're not a minority. Let's get over that and just say, All right, these are the problems we have.' "

....

"A lot of my activist friends say, why do you go on a conservative talk show? Nobody else is doing it," Arellano said at a restaurant in Santa Ana that specializes in food from the Mexican state of Puebla. Nearby, a group of day laborers wailed the day's sweat away with a few songs over a guitar.

"People who don't like Mexicans — nobody is actively engaging them unless it's a protest and they're separated by police," he added.

Arellano pondered this for a moment, then launched into another biting joke: "There's a lot of liberals who hate Mexicans too. I hate a lot of Mexicans, for that matter.

"People from Jalisco are evil. I'm from Zacatecas, and they're right next to us. There's always drama."

Thus, by doing this you have 'information' and 'knowledge,' which can answer many of your questions (and of course, you need not agree with the answers), rather than say, oh, bitching on a random web board without doing ten seconds of research. Amazing. You're welcome.

i misread this as "ambiorix burritos."

The Dallas Observer is terrible.
Arts coverage is limited (but so is art, so I guess that's not their fault), the movie reviews aren't half as good as they were a few years ago (but the VV-NT attempt to replace local critics with syndicated Hoberman/Atkinson/etc. only lasted a couple of weeks at least) and they lost the only decent sports columnist in the entire area (John Gonzalez now back in Philly I think. Or Boston.).

Musically, I give the newest editor some credit for trying - he spends a lot of time encouraging people to see live music, talking about hip-hop, and doesn't shill for every shitty band in town. But the rock he does promote leans toward the bad indie spectrum, and the rest of the features and blurbs are just filler before you get to the hooker ads.

NED WAS 'THE GAS FACE' WRITTEN IN RESPONSE TO HOAGIE PITS EFFECT ON SOCIETY/LADIES? CONFIRM OR DENY

http://www.topiclink.com/gameshows/images/generayburn.jpg

Yeah, for real! I opened this thread totally hoping to see one of James's brutal assaults on Flagpole - our alterna-weekly which is emphatically very not important, except insofar as I think freshmen still really do read it cover to cover just like I did when I was a freshman, so I suspect it has the same lame impact as it did back then. Its political coverage has fallen off completely and the EIC has been showing his true colors as a crotchety old bastard. The music coverage was never fantastic, but there are some occasional bright spots, and the guy with the "root for every band in town!" column actually does a fairly tasteful job of it. There is some negative coverage, although never anything as snarky as the stuff found in Atlanta's red-state broadsheet Stomp & Stammer. (I will say that I love their "Most Regrettable Band Promo Photo of the Month" feature or whatever it's called.) But really, so much of the paper is sort of limp human-interest stuff, and its occasional forays into investigative reporting or "see how the other half lives" tend to be well-intentioned pieces that read like first-draft blogs. We've got one really good comics guy and a whole page of hacks, and in point of fact almost all that anyone picks the paper up for is movie and concert times. Oh, and the classifieds.

See, now James would have been able to say all that in fewer words, and a much higher bile:capital-letters ratio....

The paper itself is actually quite good -- some really great reporters and curmudgeons there.

Monty Hall reference rules, btw ... ;-)

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/alt-weekly-boston-phoenix-closing

Jess was OTM all over this thread.

The extreme localizing of music coverage (due to nobody being to afford print space anymore): awesome for local musicians, lame for those writers who want to write about oddball/interesting music from somewhere else, even IF those artists are touring locally. (And my God I hate the they music be touring here/have new shit out rule.)

All of which has contributed in the years since this thread was born to me barely writing for alt weeklies today.