The Weekly Reader

American Demographics,  May 1, 2002  by Sandra Yin

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Byline: SANDRA YIN

Just who reads those free alternative weeklies lying near bank ATMs, stacked inside bookstores or left in club entrances?

The profile of the typical alternative weekly reader is changing. Once the preserve of footloose hippies and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, today's alternative weekly newspaper reader is older and more upscale. According to International Demographics, a Houston-based market research company, the average age of a regular alt-weekly reader in 2001 was 46, compared with 38 in 1995. The reader's average household income has risen to $60,597 in 2000, from $50,583 in 1995. "Their readers are looking a lot more like daily newspaper readers," says Catherine Nelson, president of publishing consulting firm Nelson Associates, who has been hired by 30 alt-weeklies. "The average age is older than we like to think."

This shift in the demographic profile has created both a challenge and an opportunity for the nation's alt-weeklies. On the one hand, it offers them a chance to boast of a more sophisticated and upscale reader to advertisers. On the other hand, it diminishes the value of alt-weeklies' core reader: the coveted young crowd of 18- to- 34-year-olds. "What alternatives typically do is reach people who are hard for other print media to reach," says Robert Broadwater, managing director of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a New York City-based investment bank that represented Stern Publishing when it sold The Village Voice to its current owner, Village Voice Media. "These are the people that the dailies are struggling to reach."

Now, as readership of traditional and alternative newspapers blurs, the nation's alt-weeklies are taking divergent paths in an effort to find a demographic profile that will be most effective in seducing advertisers. Some publishers, such as Jane Levine of the Chicago Reader and City Paper in Washington, D.C., have embraced the new, older, more affluent reader. The median age for the City Paper, for example, is now 36, up from 31 in 1987. Meanwhile, others, such as New York's The Village Voice, prefer to retool editorial and distribution to attract a younger readership. The median age, which had crept well into the 30s in the late 1990s, was pulled back to 34 last year. At The Village Voice, just over half of readers are between 18 and 34. Explains Greg Goff, executive vice president for strategic planning for Village Voice Media: "In order to remain relevant, the challenge is to continually bring in the new 18- to 25-year-old."

Still others, such as Creative Loafing, based in Atlanta, are targeting a broader readership of 18- to 54-year-olds. The median age for the weekly paper has shifted during the past 10 years to 38 from a low of 32. Forty-six percent of its readers fall in the 18- to- 34-year-old range, while another 46 percent are 35- to 54-year-olds. Ben Eason, president and CEO of Creative Loafing Inc., which owns five papers in the Southeast, is more concerned about the attitudes of his readers than their age. "Our readers are looking for a little more out of life," he says. "We're not targeting any particular demographic."

But targeting a specific demographic has become more crucial as publishers face growing pressure to boost circulation and broaden their ad base. National ad spending on alcohol, the traditional mainstay for alt-weeklies, has slowly declined as ad dollars shifted to radio and cable TV. The demise of four alt-weeklies during the past year and increased turnover in the upper ranks of sales staffs are forcing papers to identify their greatest assets so they can build up their bottom lines. What's more, the industry has drifted along with its original reader base, says Hazel Reinhardt, director of market research at Northwestern University's Media Management Center. Most publishers didn't think about making the transition to a different generation and a different set of tastes, she says. And many seem reluctant to abandon their first readers: Boomers. However, in order to expand their ad bases and evolve, publishers ultimately face tough choices: Do they continue to serve old readers or court new ones at the risk of losing the oldies? "In smaller markets, that's a pretty high-anxiety decision," says Reinhardt. "But if you don't make clear distinctions about who your reader is, it weakens your unique selling proposition. It also says that you are a very small circulation quasi-mass product."

Instead of capitalizing on its targeted reach, if an alt-weekly tries to be all things for all people, according to Reinhardt, it runs the risk of becoming a daily newspaper - and not a good one, either. It would never be competitive, says Reinhardt, because it wouldn't have the mass reach of a daily.

This small-fry reputation is exactly what alt-weeklies are trying to change. In recent years, alt-weeklies have branched out beyond local ads for futon stores and laser hair-removal services to include more national buys. Two sales networks, the Ruxton Group, founded in 1984, and the Alternative Weekly Network (AWN), founded in 1995, have attempted to give advertisers access to multiple alt-weekly markets. The former, for example, represents 24 papers in such major markets as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles; the latter represents some 124 alt-weeklies around the country.