Am I the only Stranger reader who hasn’t yet recycled the recent ”129th Annual Regrets Issue?” The beast was slow to reach the top of Pile No. 4 and now I can’t manage to let it go.
It’s the pig. Look how nicely The Stranger tarted it up with lipstick, earrings and a low-cut dress. Where else in the newspaper industry will you find such trashy but endearing artistic license?
I speak metaphorically. Remove the pig’s eyeliner and you’ll find the same business model blinking widely at you as all the other “metro weeklies” — a mix of arts, entertainment, advocacy journalism and sex all wrapped in a colorful freebie tabloid that depends entirely on ad revenue for survival. Yet somehow The Stranger has managed to take a boring, flabby, middle-aged genre and make it seem young, nubile and vaguely interesting. Even with its clothes on.
David slays Goliath in a most unusual way
I was going to say, “No wonder The Stranger came out of nowhere to kick the Seattle Weekly’s ass.” But the problem with that statement is the publishing world is first and foremost a business. Typically a newspaper won’t skyrocket in popularity merely because of better writing. What matters most are such prosaic things such as the amount of money backing you and the ruthlessness of your ad sales department.
I could only speculate as to The Stranger’s business chops, but its editorial cleverness has thoroughly outclassed the Seattle Weekly. Well, maybe outclassed is the wrong word. Out-vamped, perhaps?
Part of what makes The Stranger so unusual is that it has an Actual Editorial Personality. You’d never confuse it with any other publication, including its corporate sister the Portland Mercury. Stranger editors seem t0 have made a list of all of the newspaper industry’s content rules and dedicated themselves to mercilessly mocking every single one of them. It sort of comes off as a localized print version of the The Daily Show.
The mockery begins with the front-page slogan, “Seattle’s Only Newspaper,” which Wikipedia states is “an expression of its disdain” for the city’s other major publications. Then the table of contents page dives head-first into an insidiously subversive satire of a daily newspaper’s “public editor.”
What happens next often looks rather low-budget compared to content you might see in traditional metro weeklies. Who needs expensive investigative reporting when you can entertain readers with an “Election Glee Club” that promises to tell you whether Dow Constantine “was a stoner, a slut, or a drama fag.”
Regrets — a gimmick with surprising editorial depth
The regrets issue is cut from the same cloth. The Stranger took a newspaper ritual almost as boring as Peanuts comics — the end-of-year retrospective — and gave it a unique twist. With a knife.
Oh, sure, there’s the usual Onionesque fake-news touches such as Osama Bin Laden regretting that he has been “consigned to eternal damnation with the guy who drew The Family Circus.” And where else will you read a regret from the voters of Washington state, who admit that we’re “mostly dumb as fuck (and self-defeating on top of that). Sorry!”
But most interesting from a journalism accountability standpoint — no, this isn’t just a party — is that The Stranger apparently asked targets of its “news” coverage to critique it. Presumably with the request, “Hit me with your best shot — we won’t censor you.” Because the gloves come off in ways you’d never see in a more mainstream publication.
The Stranger bucks corporatization trend of metro weeklies
To fully appreciate The Stranger you have to know a bit about its tribal origins. Although metro weeklies started out in the 1960s as wild-eyed counter-culture mad men (yes, men), by the turn of the century the genre had been consumed by corporate empire building. A handful of firms began buying up or launching weeklies around the country. All too often those papers adopted bland, cookie-cutter editorial voices.
As a case in point, take a moment to compare the Seattle Weekly’s look and feel with its sister Voice Media Group publications such as the Minneapolis City Pages, the Denver Westword, the OC Weekly (Orange County) and the Phoenix New Times. The sameness is mesmerizing. Hell, this chain of 13 metros is so integrated that employment opportunities are listed at a centralized portal.
Perhaps the launching of the Portland Mercury is the first step down the same slippery corporate slope. And on the editorial side, one would think that a publication so dependent upon literary gimmicks would grow stale after a while. Kind of like The Onion. But in the meantime The Stranger does function as a useful lens with which to view Thurston County’s publications.
Imagine The Olympian following in the footsteps of The Stranger
I think that one of the most important points Tom Hyde makes in the previous (re)posting is the difficulty of reaching younger audiences. I particularly appreciate that he would say out loud what at least some of us have privately thought about Crosscut: ”(I)t’s really kind of all boring and tired, really smart and kind of burned out. It could use a little dash of stranger.”
You could say something similar about The Olympian. But why talk when we could visualize? Close your eyes and imagine our monopoly daily newspaper publishing a regrets issue. Picture a heaping helping of diverse, raw and uncensored critiques of The Olympian’s journalistic practices. Envision regrets volunteered from community members that are by turns hilarious and heart-breakingly poignant. And, hey, if we’re dreaming, what about a public editor who dispenses with the mealy-mouthed pomposity of the breed in favor of good, old-fashioned, journalism school fire and brimstone?
Does such an implausible scenario make your head explode?
Regrettably, we have before us an aging and sickly patient
The thing is, all local media outlets could stand to transcend their comfortable yet increasingly anachronistic formats. That doesn’t even mean indulging in The Stranger’s brand of ribald sexuality.
Consider Green Pages. It has become a genteel, coffee table magazine for old farts. It would do well to follow in the footsteps of Grist, which has aggressively courted young greens with irreverent and humorous but tough environmental coverage. Grist CEO Chip Giller told the Columbia Journalism Review, “We are trying to break through some of that cynicism and irreverence in the younger generation and get them to engage.”
If new-generation media outlets like Grist can succeed, that bodes well for Tom’s concern about the igeneration, “with its seemingly myopic focus on the personal experience and a hyper sense of self-esteem that verges o(n) delusional, give a f#$%.”
But in order to win you have to play. Olympia Power & Light seems to understand this best among local publications. Even the Cooper Point Journal has embraced the tone of a boring newspaper . . . but without much journalistic substance.
Isn’t it great that Evergreen has a journalism program worthy of the college’s overall reputation? Oh. I forgot. They don’t (although the college is hiring a lone new media/journalism faculty member). As previously discussed, the lack of well-trained, young journalism graduates is a big reason for the local media scene’s surprisingly backwater quality for a capital city, particularly regarding emerging media technologies.
This brings me to Tom’s concluding paragraph, which I assume is about contemporary journalism: “I don’t know but it seems so … bereft now … like it’s going through the motions without any passion, like passion is passe and the cool of cynicism is like … you know, whatever. Nevermind. It’s probably just me.”
Nope. If journalistic passion isn’t dead, it’s coughing up blood.
UPDATE: I regret to announce that the headline has been changed to something less obtuse.
tom hyde
January 16, 2012
I’d like to add an addendum to the thought about journalistic passion.
I have mostly transitioned to being a photographer, not a writer, or newspaperman (as my father called himself, and his father before him), or an environmental advocate, or a policy wonk.
So as someone who looks at a LOT of photography now, I see great, great passion in documentary films, documentary photography and photojournalism. I also see a lot of people pushing the traditional definitions of each. Some of the work is simply astounding and the best of it has something to say, with a vengeance. While newspaper photojournalism has taken a huge, huge hit, there are still those who go out into the world, to be a “participant,” with an idealism that is reminiscent of the best of journalism. Few of those people work as employees of any one media organization. They freelance, or get an offer to sell their mineral rights to an oil company, or get pissed off and involved. Think of Restrepo or Gasland or Aaron Huey.
Please take a look at Seattle-based Aaron Huey’s five-years of committed work on Pine Ridge Reservation as he talks about it during his TED presentation. He lived it. He is passionate about it. And I believe his work may make it into the relatively staid National Geographic in the coming year, a body of work created originally as advocacy photojournalism.
Where once newspapers were regarded by many as providing some sense of fairness in their coverage, today I believe they are so regarded by significantly fewer people. Understatement, right? Game over, really.
And maybe this is an answer – that the model of “objective,” or at least “fair” journalism in the new age of “fair and balanced” is as broken as the underlying business model; that going forward the work which will resonate will be work that is passionate, has something to say, possesses authorship, and doesn’t play the old game. You know, the shit that can sit your ass down and be real with you.
Really, what’s the point of claiming fairness if no one is going to believe you anyway? Might as well as call it like you see it. You can still be fair, or not, but you don’t have to wear the mantle like a crown of the chosen.
Right?
I don’t know but I do wish I’d been just a little more like Hunter S. … never too late. Further, stranger, the brave new media.