A few years ago, I was invited to speak at a conference for alt-weeklies in Portland, Oregon. Here’s what I remember: It was as scrappy and irreverent as you might expect from a gathering of alts (one social event included pre-rolled joints), and there were a lot of white men.
The first part surprised me. The second part shouldn’t have. Maybe the first part shouldn’t have, either.
I’ve thought about that gathering a lot over the last several months as I’ve been reporting. In fact, I thought about alts a lot when I was actively tracking layoffs and closures during the last two years of the pandemic. And frankly, as a media reporter, I value and rely on publications that report on other media and work to hold them accountable.
I often am able to learn about a publication’s past because of the thorn-in-its-side alt in town.
Because of that last part in particular, I think alts are an important part of a healthy local news ecosystem. They cover communities from within. They poke at power. And they’re often the home to tremendous reporting and writing.
In January, I heard about a new monthly publication launched in the spirit of alts in Des Moines run by, of all people, a T-shirt mogul. Then, I heard from one of the editors of Racket, which launched more than a year ago in Minneapolis after the alt there closed down. And finally, I saw that Baltimore’s getting its own new alt, Baltimore Beat, a nonprofit that’s Black-led and Black-run.
You can read about these new alts in a piece published today. For a lot of reasons, I’m happy to see this continuation (with some critical refocusing).
“It’s almost like something we couldn't shake off if we wanted to,” said Brandon Soderberg, the former editor of Baltimore City Paper and the director of operations for Baltimore Beat.
Thank goodness for that.
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