Voice of the Folks

Reason writers around town: Matt Welch gives the skinny on blogging and journalism.

Comments

[Matt Welch]

Citizen -- The anti-church thing was pretty much the conversation-stopper. I mean, there was discussion of them being contrarian, of having a certain difficult-to-define "spirit," of having certain types of ownership (one of the funny stories was how one of the alt weeklies that was *holding* the conference one year was nearly kicked out at a special session for having been bought up, if memory serves, by the local daily). My guess is that "alternative" is a bit like "obscenity" -- you know it when you see it. And I should be fair: many people who actually work at the things have been struggling over & debating this question for years, and also railing against the predictability of the things. But I think there's little denying that political positioning plays a key role (many people, for example, don't consider the New Times chain "alternative," because they look like centrists or even quasi-libertarians compared to the paleo-weeklies).

I suggested that the AAN should simply accept any applicant above a certain editorial quality that was a freely distributed weekly containing
X amount of arts and political coverage or whatever, but they thought that would leach "alternative" of whatever ill-defined meaning it already has. For whatever it's worth, I think that advertisers and industry analysts define it as a broader category closer to my definition.

[Kevin Carson]

Matt,

I don't know about the guys you talked to, but the "alternative" weekly here in Fayetteville, Ark., provides a lot of investigative jouralism on the good ol' boys that is sadly lacking in the two regional corporate dailies. The latter pretty much report the party line of local governments and chambers of commerce as straight news. "The Ozark Gazette" (formerly "The Grapevine") actually does a lot of digging into the dirt behind the press releases. The "alternative" press here, at least, provides alternative news reporting on concrete political issues we would otherwise only get one side of.

Years ago, when northwest Arkansas was just starting to consolidate into a regional media market, Claude Faulkner (an English professor) used to tell his classes: "Read the Arkansas Gazette for state and national news. Read the Morning News for official local news. Read the Grapevine for the REAL local news. And read the Northwest Arkansas Times for the want ads."

[Citizen]

Great read, really extensive history of blogs and entertaining to boot.

Did those at the convention ever give an acceptable answer to your original question concerning the validity of the title "alternative"?

[David]

Great article and insight...thanks.

[Ray]

One of the AAN members is Birmingham AL's Black and White, which is arch-conservative. It even runs Ann Coulter columns, for cryin' out loud. Your article is ridiculously overstated and just outright lame.

[adamsj]

Hi, Kevin,

As the original editor of the Ozark Gazette (which stopped publishing this spring), I can tell you that it was a bi-weekly and was not a descendant of The Grapevine.

Rather, it was the successor to the Fayetteville Begin, which I published. I put the first issue of the Begin on the streets less than two weeks after The Grapevine went on hiatus. It had no connection to The Grapevine. The Begin lasted till I went broke, a dozen issues and a broken engagement later.

The Ozark Gazette was the continuation of that project with Richard Drake and Mark Swaney as my partners. That partnership lasted six issues and did not end by my choice.

The Grapevine was and still is the only good non-daily newspaper in Fayetteville. Part of the breakup of the original Gazette partnership, I later found out, was Drake's desire that the Gazette not be a newspaper, but rather that it be an opinion journal. I would have opposed this vigorously, had I been allowed. (He wrote about this desire near the end of 1995.)

Finally, while Claude Faulkner may have said that--I don't doubt that he did say it, as decent people have, in my lifetime, always despised the Northwest Arkansas Times--the original version, which was printed at least once on the front page of The Grapevine during Ben Kimpel's lifetime, was credited to Kimpel, and went like this:

• Read the Arkansas Gazette for state, national, and world news;
• the Tulsa World for sports;
• the Springdale News for the official local news;
• The Grapevine for the unofficial local news;
• and the Northwest Arkansas Times for the classifieds.

[Finstrom Lisa]

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DATE: 05/20/2004 11:39:01
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