Actually, a lot of alt-weeklies are doing okay in terms of
advertising revenue and circulation... there are a couple of reasons
why...
A) their ad revenue always sucked... most are free and not delivered,
which means the rates they could charge for ads was always much, much,
much lower than newspapers with paid circulation and delivery... so they
developed their business much further down the chain... ie, big major
dailies had a long way to fall -- huge newsrooms to cut back and a lot
of content to cut, leading to a decline in the paper's quality...
alt-weeklies don't have fall to far -- they've developed their business
with small staffs and limits on their content from the very start...
nobody picks up their local alt-weekly and shakes their head and says
"man, this just ain't what it used to be"... because it's always been
shitty.
B) the more local a paper's content is, the better off the
circulation has been doing... you can get national news from any number
of sources, and even most of your state/regional news from any news
organization that has an AP subscription... you can't get your sulky
treatises on why Band of Horses are such sellouts anywhere but your
local alt-weekly.
C) people who do pick up alt-weeklies pick them up for different
reasons than people might pick up a newspaper or a magazine, or even
some of the bigger "alt-media" papers, like the onion's print edition...
nobody (almost nobody) is like: "Oh shit, I've got to have my copy of
the Akron alt-weekly right now!" If people were, then some smart
enterprising person would put it online (or content similar) and put the
alt-weekly out of business. Instead, most people who pick up the Akron
alt-weekly, are walking down the street and think, "oh that's an
interesting cover and i've enjoyed reading this paper" and pick it up...
or see it in a restaurant, or on the way out of the grocery store, etc.
I've replaced my NYT and WaPo reading with online versions, because why
the fuck should I wait for a paper to show up, and pay for that shit
when I can just go online. There just isnt' a huge demand for the
alt-weekly product online.
D) part of the appeal of the alt-weekly is what you see in the print
edition and isn't replaceable with an online edition. When I pick up the
DC alt-weekly, it's usually because it has good cover art -- that's
what's driving my interest, and that's not affected by the availability
of the content online, or an alternative.
The Village Voice is a big enough, serious enough publication it may
be facing problems that real newspapers have, but most alt-weeklies have
a shitty business plan to begin with, but because of the nature of
their content, many of the ones who have managed to be financially
stable to this point are holding steady.
