Media Rolls On:
Interesting article in Online Journalism Review about how alternative weekly newspapers have been asleep at the online switch while ceeding their market share in localized content and funky personal ads to online properties like Craigslist and local music blogs.
Though it devotes the majority of the piece to papers who are getting with the times, I was drawn more to its opening paragraphs which surmise that maybe alternative weekly, born in the revolutionary crucible of the 1960s are one or two information revolutions removed from now. This doesn’t explain Mother Jones and Alternet, founded by the same kinds of 60s revolutionaries as most alt-weekies, but who embraced the web immediately. The article doesn’t mention them either.
I’ve had the same curiosity about zines, arguably an alternative weekly of one. Zines are the ancestors of weblogs, undoubtedly, the most important difference being some degree of permanence. Weblogs have archives you can peruse, usually the entire history of the site. Back issues of zines go out of print the minute the box from Kinkos is empty. Zinesters move and often have, at best, a Hotmail or AOL email address. Zines almost never have websites, which is fine for a self-published journal but torture for a zine reader and suicide for the art’s history. Thanks god there are some zine libraries and a few responsible distributors. Otherwise, the whole zine explosion of the 1990s would hold roughly the same cultural significance as the Pet Rock.
I’m reminded of what someone in 12-step once told me.
“We must take change by the hand or it will take us by the throat.”
Indeed.