SALON: Two weeks ago, the 46-year-old alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix vanished in a puff of newsprint, leaving in its place a new publication called simply The Phoenix, a news-culture-lifestyle magazine as glossy as the new condominium buildings sprouting in once working-class Southie. The city’s name — the sense of place — simply disappeared. The loss was a long time for coming.
For decades, alt-weeklies have been giving hell to incompetent mayors, evil developers, and lapdog city council members with the kind of righteous rage lots of us eventually outgrow. “It’s the best damn journalism in America outside of a monthly national magazine,” says Fran Zankowski, president of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).
But alt-weeklies weren’t just good journalism. For a long time they were also, as former Village Voice columnist Rosie Gray recently put it in an article posted on Buzzfeed, “the voice of the city and of a certain kind of New Yorker.” Or a certain kind of Bostonian, or Chicagoan or San Antonian. Their trademark mix of edgy culture and political coverage all but defined the mentality of a particular urban dweller — but also defined the city itself. “Simply to be seen with the [Village] Voice set you apart,” wrote New York magazine in 2005 of the paper’s heyday. “You were one of those people — hair too long, mouth too smart, not likely to go to the prom.”… (more)
