Alt-weeklies and leftism (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Friday, 21 January 2005

Alt-weeklies and leftism

Something I pondered yesterday as I ate dinner at Fazoli’s reading both of Jackson’s alt-weeklies: why are virtually all alt-weeklies mostly left-wing affairs? The advertisers, for the most part, don’t care about the politics—they just want 18-to-34-year-old eyeballs on their ads—and most young people don’t care about politics; even the ones who do aren’t particularly leftist in their outlook (rather, the distribution is fairly evenly bimodal, since people who care about politics tend to be of one wing or the other, but the median college kid isn’t that far to the left). So why are alt-weeklies full of articles crusading for “social justice” and whining about SUV owners and people who rent movies at Blockbuster?

I suppose there’s an economic argument that leftist writers are more willing to accept low-to-nonexistent pay to produce content for the alt-weeklies than right-wingers would, since the opportunity cost for the typical left-winger is lower—but this wouldn’t apply to the college kids (including some I teach) who write a good deal for these papers. There might also be some sort of network effect; the people who set up the alt-weeklies tend to be leftists, so they get other motley liberals and progressives to join them. But if there’s money to be made running an alt-weekly, surely people with right-wing politics would also have established alt-weeklies. It’s doubly-puzzling since most college alternative newspapers are generally right-wing affairs. Any better theories?

3 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.

1. Jack wrote @ Sat, 22 Jan 2005, 7:21 am CST:

“I suppose there’s an economic argument that leftist writers are more willing to accept low-to-nonexistent pay to produce content for the alt-weeklies than right-wingers would, since the opportunity cost for the typical left-winger is lower”

That actually was quite amusing. It probably explains why virtually all full-time “activists,” with the exception of the pro-lifers, are leftists. Perhaps they have limited prospects in real jobs. Since most of these people are pretty educated, it probably has more to do with attitude than underlying ability or education.

2. mike hollihan wrote @ Sat, 22 Jan 2005, 3:34 pm CST:

Modern alt-weeklies sprang from the “counterculture” papers of the Sixties. Think Rolling Stone and Atlanta’s Creative Loafing. The modern alt-weeklies are just the institutional history brought forward. The originals attract and hire people like them, who attract and hire people like them, who attract and hire people like them…. In the early days, political zeal was all. Today, they are tempered by the need to make a profit. Find some of the older papers, compare the language and rhetoric of then to that of today.

One example: the use of shit and fuck, and the glorification of the drug experience. Rampant back then. Look at the Memphis Flyer, which has gone back and forth (mostly back) on the use of shit and fuck, and which entirely avoids drug-altered experience. Except maybe alcohol.

Today’s alt-weeklies are institutional remnants in the same way daily newspapers are, in the television age. The campus alt-alt papers might have been the next wave, but blogging came along.

3. flaime wrote @ Tue, 25 Jan 2005, 11:00 am CST:

In my experience, the people who run alt-weeklies tend to have been hired by the people who ran them previously, who were generally lefties, which means that it’s a chain that follows down.

On the other hand, most college papers I have been around have tended to be greek talk sheets that spend most of their space listing parties and pledge drives and devoting the rest of their space to school athletics first, and campus politics second, unless the greek system is under attack for it’s excesses (a fairly common thing on most campuses I’ve been on), in which case campus politics jumps up there pretty high.

The campuses without greeks on them that I have associated with tend to have pretty middle of the road papers focusing on campus events and policies, and including such outside news as the editors want to. Have to use that AP feed since the school is paying for it.

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