The Alternative Press, RIP

This year's AAN convention will occur in Phoenix, and should resemble AAN gatherings of the past. The familiar hippie staffers from alternative organs in such municipalities as Memphis, Buffalo, Sacramento and Cleveland will linger by the refreshment tables, enthusing blandly over the bean dip. The kindly middle-aged women who seem disproportionately to edit AAN papers, and who emerge every year from their offices?drawn like mountain men to jamborees, temporarily escaping the lonely wildernesses of tertiary cities in the Snow Belt?will circulate shyly. Scowling grunge-types?as well as the several hatchet-faced campus-style Marxists who still cling like barnacles to the hull of AAN's gloomy frigate?will pace themselves, emerging from cocktail party throngs to berate us New York Press staffers for colluding in the publication of material that deviates from the AAN consortium's middle-of-the-road Clintonite liberalism, not to mention from their own orthodox campus leftism, and reprimanding us generally for our impious commitment to free speech.

Still, we suspect that despite the familiar decor, this year's gathering will have something of the valedictory about it, because much has changed. The alternative press is, as we look back upon the 1990s, a moribund institution.

The industry certainly retains vestigial "radical" appendages. The San Francisco Bay Guardian, for example, remains self-parodically leftist. And one still occasionally overhears the alternative press' self-proclaimed spokesmen?Bay Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann, perhaps, or Don "The Masher" Hazen, the smarmy Californian who makes his living as the Alternet's "media critic"?pontificate about the creeping fascism of the "corporate media."

But the industry's more intelligent members acknowledge reality. They're players in an industry that produces a lucrative product: generally dull arts-and-listings tabloids, guides for the weekend amusement of the affluent bourgeoisie.

Certainly, AAN's membership includes some good newspapers. We admire Washington's City Paper, Portland's Willamette Week, Seattle's Stranger, the New Times papers, the Chicago Reader and the San Diego Reader. But that's the extent of what they are: good newspapers, as opposed to the more numerous bad ones. They're hardly integritous oppositional bulwarks against the media's corporatization and homogenization. AAN's more intelligent members recognize that, in an era in which some of the best alternative newspapers are published by "chains" like New Times, Inc., and when even the Village Voice, the model to which the industry has pathetically aspired, has been "corporate-owned"?when, indeed, AAN's membership roster lists its share of millionaires?moralized distinctions between "corporate" and "independent" media are untenable. In fact, the Voice, as Nat Hentoff reported in that paper's 5/30 issue, has started surveilling its own employees' voicemail and e-mail. So much for the freethinking culture of that brave, moral, radical organ.

The terms have changed; and in the year 2000, when the Internet, with its revolutionary information-disseminating capabilities, has become a mature enough entity to have witnessed its own boom-and-bust cycles, the institution of the "alternative press" can appear just as conventional as the "establishment" media that AAN's charter members thought they were opposing several decades ago. Even AAN's more strident members should just accept that fact, and have themselves a nice time in Phoenix. We know we will.