PressEthic

It's hard to make sense of things in the media world these days. Network newscasts that bring in millions of viewers a night are called sinking ships, journalists are going to jail to protect administration spin doctors, and gossip bloggers are giving lectures at journalism grad schools.

And now, the Village Voice, the nation's first alternative weekly, has inked a deal that makes it part of the 17-paper, nationwide chain of New Times. According to an article in the New York Times, New Times publications will reach an estimated 25 percent of alternative newsweekly readers nationwide.

Calling the Voice an alternative paper now is a bit like calling Pearl Jam an "alternative rock band" when it's selling out Madison Square Garden. Alternative weeklies traditionally draw their moral righteousness from the fact that they're not part of big corporations. That's tricky to do when your paper is now part of an anti-trust lawsuit.

It's hard to argue that the Voice is an alternative paper when it's running ads from American Express. The bigger question this raises is whether the moniker "alternative paper" is itself a relic in the age of blogs. Everyone is his own alternative press now.

There's always been an audience of readers who want something beyond the dominant news source in an area, but the political landscape has changed that. Put simply, there's not one alternative anymore, just as there's not one mainstream. A "mainstream media" newspaper reaches maybe 200,000 readers in a day if it's a successful publication in a good size town. Rush Limbaugh reaches millions. The right generates its own publications as an alternative to the "mainstream" (which basically means any traditional news outlet that's been around since World War II, no matter how successful it is), while the old left, from which the embryonic Voice grew, sees the mainstream as too soft and conservative.

Instead of clear lines between the mainstream and the alternative, we're left with relativism. Each outlet has the luxury to exist in an echo chamber, knowing that its readers have the freedom to only tune into other outlets that agree to the same basic constructs and ideologies.

What does that relativism mean to average readers? It depends on whom you ask.