Alternative Media Showcase: The Stranger
One of the most successful alternative newspapers in the United States is The Stranger. I have heard about this Seattle institution since I first learned about alternative media in college and have read it off and on for years. It shouldn’t be surprising for anyone familiar with the presence of countercultures, alternative ideas and social consciousness in Seattle that The Stranger is a success.
The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies places the weekly’s circulation at 89,580 though this number expands drastically due to the paper’s fantastic website. The Stranger was established in 1991 by The Onion co-founder Tim Keck and shares a portion of the latter paper’s satirical lens. Alternative newspaper readers would be interested to know that “Savage Love? writer Dan Savage is the paper’s editorial director. It seems that all roads into the alternative news community run through The Stranger’s offices.
It would be easy to speak about the influences of people like Keck and Savage in a profile of The Stranger. I find the paper’s feature stories far more interesting than the music and film reviews because I can get similar reviews from other outlets. The mainstream media in Seattle does not cover issues like the city’s police shortage and interesting developments in condominium development. These two stories are the features for March 26th and April 1st and highlight the in depth analysis provided by The Stranger. The police shortage story is particularly fascinating because it overwhelms the reader with anecdotes ranging from auto theft to murder that highlight the writer’s case.
The publication’s website is a wealth of knowledge on the Pacific Northwest for readers outside of Seattle. Slog is the paper’s blog and provides several posts daily on political and community news that may not find room in the week’s print edition. I would suggest that anyone who wants to start a zine, blog or alternative newspaper should use The Stranger as a case study of brilliant editorial decisions.
April 9th, 2008 at 4:56 am
[...] have showed my bias toward the continental United States in my profiles on alternative newspapers and magazines over the last two weeks. The Hawaiian Islands have some great local publications that [...]