While the upstart Herald trying to gain a steady market share from the hegemonic Globe has garnered a bit of attention, Steve Bailey discusses the other newspaper war in town: the challenge the Weekly Dig is mounting against the Phoenix.
Can a soon-to-be-40 alternative paper continue to connect with its twentysomething audience?
Others have tried to take on Mindich and failed. Now Herb Lipson and his son David, owners of Boston and Philadelphia magazines, have bought the five-year-old Weekly Dig with plans to pour in the resources and turn up the heat on the Phoenix.
Like the Herald-Globe battle, it’s not a match of equals. Not only does Weekly Dig not have the resources to provide much in the way of original reporting, its production values are considerably weaker. And its hipster readership is probably far too narrow to offer a meaningful assault of the broad readership satisfied by the Phoenix. The latter’s stuffiness will make an easy target for the irreverent Dig, but it has substance in its book, theatre and food reviews (Robert Nadeau is one of the best restaurant reviewers in the city, far surpassing the Globe’s lifestyle voyeurism), whereas the Dig’s snark hems it in.
But it’s easy to see how the challenge has come. Alternative weeklies rely on nightlife coverage to sustain the local advertising to subsidize more substantive content. And both the Phoenix film reviews and the music coverage are poor. Mind you, my beef with the film section is generally an annoyance with Peter Keough’s middle-brow preference for “anti-commercial” narrative films — something I don’t expect the Weekly Dig to break with. But the problems with the music coverage are more serious. Album reviews come out weeks, even months after the release date, too much space is given to reviews of live shows that by nature one can’t attend, and in general the tone is one of reverence for the Boston scene’s musical past but not much to say about what’s going on currently. The Phoenix writers are still stuck in the Mission to Burma show they attended back in the day. Good for them, but not the best formula for the paper staying current.
I don’t know that the matter has to be either/or. There might be room for competing papers speaking to different market niches. Only advertising dollars are finite, and when you add in the glossier upscale weeklies (Improper Bostonian, the Phoenix’s Stuff at Night), there may be a media squeeze pushing someone out. I just wouldn’t count on the Phoenix being the loser just yet.
UPDATE: I see that this week’s Phoenix has a new layout and beefed up Music and Nightlife section. So maybe I spoke a little too soon. Then again, I turn to page 6 and read this:
The band [Mission of Burma] were super-comfortable because they’d recorded ONoffON there the previous year, and they tore through an eight-song set including the rarely played “Tremolo,” which Merge Records proclaims “blows away” the version on 1985’s The Horrible Truth About Burma (Ace of Hearts), the only other place the song appears. Speaking as someone who was in the room (brag alert: I introduced ‘em): you could see the smile on their faces, as if they knew they were completing something special.
Alert, indeed. Why is Burma’s brief career such an ur-moment in the Boston rock music imaginary?
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