Print or Perish: Why the Left Needs to Resurrect Alt-Weeklies to Rebuild Its Base
After ten years running a digital alt-news site in Western Massachusetts, I came to a hard truth: we’re not reaching the working class through podcasts, Substacks, or social media. This essay blends personal narrative with political strategy to argue that the American left needs to resurrect a forgotten tool of organizing and solidarity—the local print weekly. Drawing from my own experience building The Greylock Glass and now launching The Greylock Guardian, I explore how alt-weeklies once served as physical infrastructure for class consciousness, cultural resistance, and grassroots action. In the face of a collapsing digital landscape and rising fascism, it’s time to stop waiting for the algorithm to save us. If we want to build power from the bottom up, we need to put ink on paper—and get it into diners, barbershops, and bus stops before it’s too late.
I celebrated the tenth anniversary of The Greylock Glass in the tiny Campus Safety booth of an elite liberal arts college in Vermont known for its excellent writing program and college-sanctioned twice-weekly Bacchanalias. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to be in some rented hall, giving a teary, inebriated speech thanking my donors, advertisers, and contributors (even the interns) before introducing the first band — one that I had discovered and promoted long before they’d been invited to do a Tiny Desk Concert.
Instead, I hadn’t written a goddamn thing in weeks, and the online news site was sliding into irrelevancy. I was spending my time in wage-slavery as a safety dispatcher after a decade publishing thousands of posts and podcasts and conducting interviews with hundreds of Grammy, Pulitzer, Obie, and James Beard winners, and internationally known thought-leaders like Timothy Schneider and Richard Wolfe. At the local level, I’d told the stories of countless artists of all stripes, educators, activists and community leaders, politicians, business owners, and just regular folks in the region. Where the hell did I go wrong?
This isn’t just a postmortem of a scrappy local news outlet. It’s an argument: the collapse of local print journalism—especially alt-weeklies—has gutted the organizing infrastructure of the American Left. We’ve got brilliant podcasts, incisive YouTube channels, and endless Twitter debates, but no real way to reach the working class where they live. If we want to rebuild power from the ground up, we need to bring back something as old as it is radical: a physical paper you can hold in your hands.
I had billed the Glass early on as “The Berkshires’ Mightiest Independent Alternative Newsthing.” The Berkshires of Western Mass, the epicenter of Norman Rockwellianism, had never had an alternative newspaper, unlike her neighbors in the Connecticut River Valley and New York’s Capital Region. The simple reason was that the county wasn’t supposed to need an alternative newspaper. Everything is supposed to be so…nice. And clean. And homogenous of opinion that anyone who might point out the corruption, grift, nepotism, poverty, and unvarnished racism was just a ne’er-do-well agitator. We’d already proudly recognized W.E.B. Du Bois as a favorite son— wasn’t that enough?
But, in January of 2015, as marketing director for Shakespeare & Company, I had allowed a number of Arts & Culture colleagues to convince me that I should return to journalism and start a new publication that had a strong Arts backbone, something that had been nearly amputated from the Berkshire Eagle after its takeover by Alden Capital/Digital First Media. Friends implored me to start a magazine covering and boosterizing the local creative scene. I said hell no. If I was going to do this, it was going to have to be digital. No way was I going to incur the costs in time and expense of print. I would launch as online-only in the coming months.
I began covering everything from dance to theatre to food to recreation in the great New England outdoors. The arts organizations, especially, made it easy — communications departments were only too eager to provide professional photos and exclusive interviews. I started attracting contributors and advertisers. I had access to events, organization, and people that really let me peer into the soft underbelly of the Berkshires. I got invited to a ridiculous number of annual galas. The local chamber of commerce that had metastasized to swallow up the regional arts council and tourist bureau even made the mistake once of inviting me to its annual meeting hosted at the headquarters of my nemesis, the Berkshire Eagle. The next year’s event was located in the bowels of General Dynamics Mission Systems, and you needed — I’m not making this up — security clearance to attend. I declined.
But by then, my secret agenda was out in the open. I’d been alternating stories of gallery openings with stories of poverty, labor actions, and police profiling. Many in my base of supporters jumped ship after I wrote articles dealing in controversy, writing me huffy cancellation e-mails, asking me why I had to “get so political — why can’t you just stick to Arts & Culture” articles they were looking for.
Watchdog investigative pieces, such as one describing the surreptitious installation of video cameras by one school district on all buses fell flat. No public discussion. No guidelines about footage access, storage, or eventual destruction. No safeguards describing what steps would be taken to ensure student privacy. And yet, two weeks of reporting were met by my most dyed-in-the-wool liberal acquaintances with a “why are you making a big deal about this? Don’t you want to protect the kids?” attitude.
Then, after getting permission to air Democracy Now!, CounterSpin, and Economic Update with Richard Wolff, on the streaming radio station I’d launched as an offshoot, largely to promote local musicians, more nails were driven into the coffin of my reputation. I wasn’t just a progressive. I was a full-blown Lefty, maybe even a Red…
Now, six or seven years into the project, I was coming to understand (alright, alright, I’m a little slow on the uptake) that the Arts & Culture elite — the donors and directors and opinionator clique — had no interest in elevating the plight of the poor or seeking to expand justice for Black and Brown people at the street level. Absolutely they’d produce exhibitions by a politically eloquent Mexican artist at the contemporary arts museum. Absolutely they’d cast Black actors in traditionally white roles. Absolutely they’d hang their Pride Flags out front, but the back offices maintained an #ArtSoWhiteAndHetero grip on the professional positions through which decisions were made.
Out of the dozens of arts organizations in the area, only four advertised, and of them, only two advertised more than one year. None of the other institutions would agree even to have an ad sales meeting over the phone. The press releases, ironically, kept flooding my inbox. I started hearing through the grapevine, and from colleagues at other publications, that I’d been blacklisted.
When COVID struck, the bottom pretty much fell out of the whole endeavor. Most of my advertisers were businesses and organizations that depended on keeping their doors open to the public. Restaurants. Music venues. Theatres. If you aren’t allowed to open, there’s not much reason to advertise. I was ineligible for any of the free government money that some freelancer friends who worked from home anyway were able to score (no bitterness there…) But I decided to soldier on.
In early 2020, I wrote a piece exploring the possible effects on the homeless due to the pandemic. At nearly the same time, my most generous writing contributor penned a “best home-decor shopping in Hudson” article — meant to be a little light-hearted fluff. To this day, while her story has generated (and continues to generate) over 60,000 unique reads, my homelessness article has attracted maybe 100 sets of eyeballs. That broke me and caused me to seriously question my purpose.
I didn’t shutter the news site, but published only occasionally, while working get-me-by jobs and driving for Uber and DoorDash. The Uber experience is not one I’d recommend, but it did give me great fodder for some of the narrative pieces I’m most proud of and put me back in touch with the people I most wanted to serve and protect — The People. I asked my fares a lot of questions over the next couple years, questions about how they got their news, what they thought of journalism as a whole, what kind of standard of living were they going through, and did they feel life was getting harder or easier.
Overwhelmingly (except for the time I had one of the Bush family and his billionaire wife in my back seat — and yes, they were shitty tippers), our conversations revealed massive frustration about the state of affairs for the working class. They couldn’t understand how, with all the power and wealth at the disposal of local, state, and federal leaders, somehow the Great Recession just never seemed to end for them, their families, and their communities. Where did they get their news? Facebook. Co-workers. Sometimes Fox or CNN. Many people admitted that they’d stopped paying attention to the news. Journalists were liars or carrying water for the powerful. Across hundreds of rides and dozens of towns, I heard the same refrain: we’re ignored, we’re lied to, and nobody speaks for us.
That was my lightning.
Over and over, I listened to perfectly rational analyses of a rigged game these passengers couldn’t afford to stop playing. The sentiment came from all types: nurses, drug dealers, waiters, prostitutes, Amazon warehouse workers, soldiers, retail clerks.
They ran faster and faster on the treadmill of capitalism and got nowhere. A surprising number of my fares even put their finger on the fact that capitalism (“bullshit capitalism” was a common phrase) was the engine of their miseries, even if they weren’t ready to openly embrace socialism. The unifying thread, though was, “Nobody’s speaking for us.”
But, of course, people were speaking up for us. I knew it because every day I listened, between fares usually, to news outlets like Democracy Now! and podcasts like Bad Faith and Citations Needed, and Jacobin. I asked some of my more disgruntled passengers if they’d heard of these programs. Almost to a one, they hadn’t. Why would they have? Their friends and families didn’t listen. Their co-workers didn’t. And the algorithms didn’t drop promotional posts in their social media feeds.
The people who listen to lefty shows are typically people who go searching for them. And this is a problem. The content lives in silos that inform and reinforce my worldview, for sure, but if the same 100,000 people are all listening to the same podcasts (and not sharing links to these programs much, per my online experience) how are the masses supposed to get turned on to a version of reality backed up by facts and thoughtful analysis?
A more serious problem is the thoughtful analysis itself. So many of the hosts and guests on these shows are highly educated eloquent speakers and critical thinkers who just aren’t reflective of great swaths of the working class. No judgement against my brothers and sisters in the proletariat — just reality. This country increasingly fails our students. A majority of U.S. Americans have reading skills that equip them for text comprehension at about the sixth-grade level. Spoken information grasp is likely higher, but the number of academics interviewed on these programs who generously adorn these discussions with 50¢ words make it pretty clear they assume an audience of graduate level linguistic competence.
Add to this hurdle the situation that the facts and concepts of multigenerational oppression and social engineering often discussed are, at least as presented, completely new to potential working class readers and listeners. I learned about the bloody labor clashes of the early 20th century in college, and then only as footnotes. Marxist theory? Wasn’t offered in any of the classes in my school’s catalog — not at the undergrad level anyway.
Yes, those of us at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder absolutely need to be able to describe our exploitation with a common vocabulary, one that is steeped in the studies of both contemporary and historical critical arguments. That understanding isn’t going to be absorbed until a delivery mechanism appears that is both discoverable by, and accessible to, the tens of millions of people who need to hear the message.
Because if this country’s going to claw its way back from the multiple brinks of climate apocalypse, out-of-control militarism, and economic decay, we need to stop waiting for algorithm run by billionaires to save us. We need to put the news back in people’s hands.
Fortunately, we already have a model for this medium — the underground or alt-weekly newspaper. I started becoming aware of class struggle as a teenager and twenty-something in the late 1980s, which was the golden age of alt-weeklies. Over the next decade, I searched first in every new city I rambled — Hartford, Boston, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Seattle, Knoxville — for the alt-weekly newspaper. I was thrilled at the pugilistic, daring reporting produced by so many writers who held power to account, exposing corruption and misdeeds by the business and political class. That these newspapers could even exist confirmed my naive belief that the Left had basically vanquished idiot ideologies and institutions that had been standing in the way of human progress. Sure, a significant amount of socio-economic mopping up remained, but the quest for wide-spectrum justice and equality would deliver even the poorest, most abused out of misery in time.
The tale of how these newspapers, in large part, were either shuttered or absorbed into the very mainstream publications to which they were intended to be the alternative is both tragic and complicated. The reasons for their demise overlap, though not entirely, with the reasons why the United States witnessed the death of approximately 3,000 local print newspapers between 2004 and today. The time for rebirth of the print underground/alt-weeklies, however, has arrived. Such a resurgence is critical to the fight against fascism and a resumption of the struggle of workers to reclaim the dignity and quality of life our labor should guarantee.
Having published a free community newspaper over twenty years ago, I know the power that a stack of newspapers can have. As a journalist, I don’t have to just hope my articles get served up by the very platforms that have been trying to destroy local news — the newspaper is immediately discoverable in the daily destinations of the people it serves. Sitting on a table in a barber shop or laundry or coffee shop, a periodical that reflects the lives its readers has the ability to yank audience’s eyes away from smart phone screens and into the stories of their neighborhoods — and themselves.
I wouldn’t advise a new local lefty media enterprise to shout from the street corner, “Extra! Extra! Getcher copy of Hometown Socialist Times, hot off the press!” An editorial journey can start, however, with investigations into wage-theft, tenant rights abuses, and the uncanny ability of cities to fix the potholes in affluent neighborhoods before whole streets in poor districts look like mine fields, despite comparable property value totals. An introduction into socialist thought can be built on a foundation of real world struggles faced by readers.
Once such a newspaper has developed a following, deeper dives into structural inequities can be examined, not just by original reporting, but also through partnerships with the very podcasts, magazines, and news programs that align with the mission of the paper. Excerpts of articles in national magazines can contain links or QR codes to full-length works online. Similarly, a “what we’re listening to now” round of leftist podcasts can give overviews of relevant episodes containing a QR code through which readers actually turn into listeners of shows that provide in-depth coverage of the state of workers’ broader efforts to secure economic gains and stability.
In fact, local and non–geographic-specific media can complement and support each other quite handily. A podcast that seems to have plateaued in subscribers can reach into potential new audiences, while a mention of an article in a local alt-weekly could result in contributions from people anywhere in the world. The greatest challenge for local media in places like the Berkshires is that it takes the same amount of time/money/effort to report on and publish a hard-hitting story about corruption that 10,000 people, at most will read as it does for a readership of 100,000 in a mid-sized or major city. The national alternative media could help local newspapers achieve greater sustainability while the local alt-weeklies can incubate a larger and larger share of class awareness.
I watched a short video on social media the other day that described the various evils perpetrated by the extreme right at both the state and federal levels. I agreed with all of the points made until the producer urged viewers to give up on trying to bring the MAGA crowd around to a rational view of political and societal reality. We must never give up. The middle and upper class supporters of the Trump administration policies back fascism because it protects and elevates their station in life — they probably are lost, at least for now. But the working poor who fall for the right-wing bullshit? They do so because they’ve been infected — they’ve contracted a bad case of despair and desperation. And they, my brothers and sisters, are just inches away from us on the wheel of class consciousness.
The operation will be a delicate one, but it’s one that I’m undertaking and launching before Spring. My new print, publication, The Greylock Guardian, will attempt to distill some of the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, class warfare, and yes, bald-faced socialism, through local storytelling. I’m going to start with a press run of 1,000 and then, slowly, expand circulation in both total numbers of copies and geographic reach. Given that our mainstream newspaper is pretty much completely paywalled, I’ll actually be one of the only games in town — not a bad place to start.
You can follow our journey at greylockguardian.com, and if you’d like to contribute talent (or coin) to the effort, you’ll find a link there to do just that. Anyone who feels inclined to try to launch their own leftist rag is also welcome to contact me to pick my brain or just for camaraderie. A network of people’s press newsrooms across the nation might be the only thing that gets us out of this century alive and with some semblance of democracy intact.
No comments:
Post a Comment