Have Mac, will publish; today's alternative papers are surprisingly good. Here's why.

• Author: Eisendrath, John

Have Mac, Will Publish

For years children died painfully and unnecessarily in the working-class neighborhood of Phoenix called Maryvale. They died of leukemia. They died often: At least 28 succumbed between 1961 and 1985, twice the national rate. Even though state health officials knew about cancer-causing groundwater contamination in Maryvale, they refused to investigate. And local elementary school officials covered up, fearing disclosure's impact on enrollment. The daily papers missed the story. Ditto local TV news.

It was the Phoenix New Times that nailed it. That alternative weekly broke the story in June 1987. Within weeks the scandal attracted politicians, health officials, and dailies like the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Republic. Within months the bandwagon stopped. And today only two constants remain: Maryvale's groundwater is still contaminated, and the New Times is still on the case, still chiding polluters, government officials, and the public.

The New Times's well-documented, heart-rending, and consistent coverage represents journalism--alternative or otherwise--at its best. Alternative papers often do. This may come as a surprise to those outside the journalism fraternity, but on the inside it is well-known. In fact, one of the mainstream media's dirty little secrets is the frequency with which reporters on daily papers crib ideas, quotes, and more from their alternative counterparts.

When you look at some of the great stuff that shows up in the alternative press, that's hardly surprising. Like last December when the L.A. Weekly described how, in 1976, as director of the CIA, George Bush defied orders from President Ford to release documents vital to a Justice Department investigation of CIA involvement in covert domestic operations. Two months passed before the same incident got the attention of The New York Times.

These stories don't just happen; they come about because alternative newspapers are in a position to do things that the big boys no longer have interest in or feel comfortable with. Most of the alternatives are financial upstarts and hence tend to be freer from the corporate and Chamber of Commerce mentality that so often gets in the way of the real stories. Especially the local ones that Knight-Ridder or Cox overlook because they are not usable in multiple markets. Being more financially marginal also means that these papers attract writers who come to a story for reasons other than money--reasons like they care about their subject, or are pissed-off about a misdeed. It also means the alternatives are more open to writers without the "right" Journalism 101 credentials. Although this produces reams of purple prose and painfully twisted syntax, it also undoubtedly spawns freshness in content and style. And alternatives can report on mainstream newspapers with great effect.

None of this is to say that the alternatives don't turn out their share of lousy journalism. They have for instance, a tendency to be longwinded. A recent East Bay (Berkeley) Express cover story jumps to pages 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19--at which point the writer pauses to offer a loving exegesis on animal excrement. A promising story on women working their way through college as strippers in the Chico (California) News and Review is likewise digressive--for some reason, half the story's space is given over to a writer's personal breast flashbacks.

And the alternatives are no stranger to irresponsibility. In February the San Luis Obispo New Times ran a story headlined "Parole Denied" in which California prison officials were ripped for not supporting the release of a convicted kidnapper. Yet it turns out that the author never spoke with the allegedly reformed prisoner, and her scathing critique was based exclusively on comments by the kidnapper's attorney. And don't forget sophomoric: Rhode Island's weekly New Times refers to the daily Providence Journal as the "Providence Urinal."

So admittedly, alternatives are erratic. But they offer a glimpse of what more big-time newspaper journalism should and could be: interpretive, reflective, and iconoclastic. They remind us of the limits of the five W's school of journalism and the value of point of view. As many dailies either fold or become homogenized members of a national chain or enter into quasi-monopolistic joint operating agreements, the alternatives stand apart, siren-like, daring dailies to be different.

Growing in a generation from a lone voice in Texas to more than 100 papers with a weekly readership in excess of three million, alternatives are an emergent and in some ways revolutionary force in American newspaper journalism. Even if at this stage much of the force is still just potential, it's a very promising potential.

From the start the alternative press has been liberal. It began in 1954 when a group of Texas Democrats approached Ronnie Dugger about starting a weekly paper. "In the mid 1950s people in Texas were in despair about the daily press," recalls Dugger. "[It] was racist, anti-civil liberties, a black hole culturally." His alternative, the Texas Observer, was and is unabashedly populist and purely political. No sports. No crossword puzzles. No cartoons. It's always been a classic muckraking journal.

A year later and a world apart, Norman Mailer, Dan Wolf, and Ed Fancher founded the Village Voice. Conceived of as a writer's paper, the Voice introduced the New Journalism of Mailer and Tom Wolfe. The 1960s were, according to Geoffrey Stokes, a Voice columnist and author of the Voice Anthology, "arguably the paper's heyday, as its new writers, unleashed by Wolf, chronicled--passionately--the civil-rights movement, hippies, Yippies, dope, rock, the peace movement, Chicago...."

The Observer is restrained. The Voice is emotional. The former singularly political. The latter an innovator in arts and entertainment reporting. One sets an agenda. The other a lifestyle. They represent the alternative extremes. Newer alternatives almost always aim somewhere in between.

Interviews and punch outs

Strains of the Voice are evident in papers like the Boston Phoenix, created in 1966 as a vehicle to publish arts and entertainment listings with "news as an afterthought," says Katherine Fulton, editor of The Independent in Durham, North Carolina. Others, taking their cues from the Observer, were all news. The Phoenix New Times, for instance...