The Alternative Press Has a Business Model, Too

All over the country, one long-standing category of media seems to be faring slightly better than others, and that would be the alternative publications. There are a number of factors at play here, which we’ll get to in a moment.

For today’s post, I’m going to stick to the west coast, from the Mexican border up to just across into Canada. But as an awards judge for AlterNet, the national organization of alternative publications, the past couple years, I have noticed that a great amount of quality work continues to be done by these publications all across the country.

A prime example is the Voice of San Diego, which uses a non-profit, online business model to deliver investigative reporting to its user base. Started in 2005 by philanthropist Buzz Woolley and long-time newsman Neil Morgan, the Voice has evolved into an effective community resource. It survives on a combination of three funding streams — foundation grants, member donations and advertising.

Up the freeway in L.A., for the past thirty years the LA Weekly has been a steady source of good journalism and useful community information. Like almost all of the alternative publications, it is free and has adapted to the web more quickly than have traditional newspapers. Its revenue consists of local classified and display ads, and some national advertising sales.

The San Francisco Bay Area has long been a hub for the alternative press and still is home to the SF Bay Guardian, the SF Weekly, the East Bay Express, and several smaller publications, including the Berkeley Daily Planet. These organizations are all capable of delivering award-winning investigative reporting on the region, even as the traditional newspapers have all weakened substantially.

Up the coast to Portland, the independently owned Willamette Week, which has long been a strong voice in its community, and is the only weekly newspaper ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting (2005).  It primarily targets 18-34 year olds in the Portland area.

North, in Seattle, a more recent arrival of note is Crosscut, which I’ve found a useful source of news about the crisis afflicting mainstream papers in the area. This site seems a bit more devoted to service as opposed to muckraking, but it is especially attentive to documenting the local newspaper industry, which is involved in what may be its death spiral in Seattle, as we’ve mentioned here recently.

David Brewster, founder and former publisher of the Seattle Weekly, one of the country’s first alternative weeklies, started Crosscut last year as a commercial business, but says he now is shifting to a nonprofit status in order to add two new revenue streams—memberships and grants.

Just north of the border, in Vancouver, is yet another flavor of the alternative press. Veteran journalist David Beers uses a mix of investments, grants, public contributions, and ad sales to support the Tyee, which he launched in 2003, initially with financial support from labor groups.

The Tyee is blunt in its political stance, as Beers, a former journalist in San Francisco and Vancouver, explained recently to the Chicago Reader’s Michael Miner: “We’re structured as a for-profit, but we don’t make any money and we’re not designed to make money.” The Tyee has twice asked its readers to contribute to the Tyee Fellowship Fund, a not-for-profit Beers established to pay for in-depth reporting in two general areas he calls “Let’s get the bastards” and “Let’s dream up a better way to solve our problems.”

So far, this model seems to be working in the Vancouver area, as the paper has successfully published a solid string of investigative articles.

I know I have failed to mention many other worthy alternative publications up and down the coast, but my goal tonight is simply to provide the briefest of surveys. In all the reporting on the collapse of the mainstream press, we all too often overlook the continuing presence of these other types of media institutions that are surviving and even thriving on a combination of strong community support and  hard-hitting original reporting, plus a much lower cost structure than the big boys carry.

And — most importantly, unlike the bigger cousins in the MSM, these publications rapidly adapted to the web and have to a large degree improved their regional market share as a result.

Of course, they’ve eschewed conventional business models, but who cares about those anymore? They’re failing. In any event, in future months, I hope to take a closer look at some of these and other alternative models for hints at what may emerge as a replicable media model stretching into the future.