There's probably a few tree's worth of free publications in great disarray on the floor or shelves in the back of your favorite independent cafe. It's a bit of a local phenomenon. Matt Asher, publisher of Space for Rent and the now defunct Seattle Scroll, remembers how he was impressed with the free-publication scene when he first moved here from Chicago: "Most cities have a single major weekly. Here you have two major weeklies and dozens of other papers....You could spend your whole life just reading free publications in Seattle."

Jim Sullivan, operator of Gargolyle Distribution, which distributes a number of free publications in the Seattle area, has noticed a steady uptick in new freebies in the area, but also steady interest from major free papers in additional distribution locations, which he sees as a "strong indicator of viable readership and unmet demand."

Why is Seattle such a greenhouse for free publications? Sullivan points to the cultural and economic variety in the region: "We cover the gamut from agriculture to manufacturing to military/government to service industries, and we have a strong export/import base, plus gaming and natural resource industries. With such diversity it is impossible for traditional news media to appeal to everyone. Thus we have the continuing growth in 'niche' publications."

Another reason for the plethora of smaller publications is that people aren't reading daily newpapers as much, especially young people, and Seattle has become a town of young educated migrants from other parts of the US. Asher sums it up this way: "Dailies are the IBM of publishing. Young people just see them and think, 'What does it mean to me?'"

The Decline of the Dailies
Numerous recent articles in Editor and Publisher also attest that daily newspapers have largely lost the 18-to-40-year-old audience. Dailies have in fact been losing overall readership for years. According to figures given for the nation's top dailies in a report by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the New York Times weekday circulation fell a dramatic five percent from 1996 to 1997. Sunday circulation had long held steady in the nation's dailies, but declined last year for 21 of the largest 25 papers. At the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer - which has the nation's 19th largest Sunday readership-Sunday circulation fell about one percent from 506,000 to 502,000.

With this decrease of daily papers, one might expect to see a decrease in the amount of newsprint consumed. Not the case. Newsprint consumption actually scored a one percent increase from 1996 to 1997. It's now more than 11 million tons a year in the US, says the industry magazine Pulp and Paper (December 1997).

My guess is that some of this extra newsprint went to zines. Zines have stepped in as a sort of anarchist literacy program for the younger crowd who have never got hooked on the dailies.

The daily papers are not oblivious to this. In fact, a couple of local zine-like publications come from the belly of the dragon, the Seattle Times itself. The Times in the past few years has come out locally with the Mirror, a way-rad monthly aimed at and largely written by the teen set, but too wholesome to be truly classified as a zine. It makes perfect business sense for the Times to publish this. Youthful readership is what advertisers lust for. The Times has other side ventures, like the Downtown Source, a faintly irreverant urban weekly, aimed at the 18-to-40-year-old set.

Slowly and clumsily, even the dailies themselves seem to be dismantling themselves in favor of smaller, free niche publications.

Sullivan of Gargoyle Distribution explains that the "Dailies...contain a wealth of information, much of which is of little value to the individual reader. When you shop for meat, do you buy the entire animal? Of course not. That's why people are increasingly less inclined to buy the total paper."

Cost is also a big factor. Instead of paying 50 cents to buy the Thursday Times for its weekend entertainment listings, you can just pick up the Stranger or the Weekly for free.

The Rise of the Freebies
By going to free distribution, weekly publishers have thrown down the glove to the dailies. David Schneiderman, president of Stern Publishing, the Village Voice chain that now owns the Seattle Weekly, told Editor and Publisher (May 31, 1997) that "the big strategy is to develop significant circulation numbers in the cities so we can challenge the dailies for advertising." Circulation of the Weekly is currently about 120,000, still only about a quarter of the figure for the Sunday Times/P-I. But circulation of the Weekly has nearly doubled since it became a free paper last year.

In a sense, the weeklies have turned the tables on the dailies. Not long ago the Seattle dailies were the cheap news sources of mass appeal and cost only 35 cents, while the Weekly was a yuppie publication that cost 75 cents. Now, the dailies have raised their newstand price while the Weekly has opted for a larger free distribution.

The trend toward gratis weeklies is a response to changing class demographics. It used to be that a paper like the Seattle Weekly could make more money with a high newsstand price. The high newsstand price ensured that the readership was relatively wealthy on average, which made it possible to also demand premium prices for ads targeted to wealthy yuppie readers. But as the spending power of the average worker declines, this strategy becomes less feasible. As the Stranger first proved, free weekly distribution now provides the mass circulation necessary for attracting large quantities of ads, rather than just a few expensive blue-blood ads. That's why the Weekly has gotten a lot fatter since it became free.

Along with this mass-advertising strategy, free distribution also goes hand-in-hand with a more populist content to news reporting. I thought I'd never live to see the day, but now the Weekly has some great reporting with working-class angles to it, including news on tenant issues, labor issues, and even critical coverage of some large corporate advertisers. These topics will probably be allowed to flourish as long as Nordstrom ads aren't the primary goal of the paper.

The modern trend toward low-cost populist journalism is actually part of a historical cycle. The famous American newspaper publishers of the last two centuries-Horace Greeley, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst-all initially made their names by slashing newsstand prices, attracting mass advertising, and providing politically progressive content.

But as Mitchell Stephens points out in his book A History of News, "As the decades passed, there came times when it seemed too many publishers had again become captivated by the charms of a 'respectable' monied readership, when newspaper prices crept higher and their pages grew more 'serious.' But then the journalistic world again would be refreshed by a new wave of 'popular' journalism, bringing new readers and even larger circulations."

The avant garde of the most recent "new wave" of journalism are, of course, the zine publishers, who have abounded in the Seattle area.

Where there are malls, there are no zines
The term "zine" needs definition. The Washington Free Press itself has been called a zine. Generally, a zine is a scrappy and irreverent product of mostly volunteer desktop publishing. It has no office. It is unpolished and unglossy. It covers topics that large established papers are afraid to touch because of ownership or advertising pressures. It proudly appeals to only a segment of society, and isn't afraid to admit its own biases. Many zines are in fact "illegal" operations in that they don't have business licenses. These zines probably don't generate enough revenue to particulary interest the tax collectors, but the raw, opinionated and bawdy character of zine writing has had an impact on mainstream journalism in recent years. Mainstream writers have acquired more of an attitude, and a more colloquial writing style, part of the populist trend that you see in both local weeklies.

Zines have antecendents in all sorts of undergound papers. Some political zines are similar to what were known as libelles in 18th-century France, which were written by "a sort of literary proletariat," according to historian Robert Darnton. They were mostly of underground distribution and contained outrageous criticism of the church, the artistocracy, and the academy. They became popular due to the large amount of censorship in the state-approved newspapers of France. Stephens in A History of News gives them partial credit for the excesses of the French Revolution.

In 19th-century England, the "pauper press" evaded the stamp tax, an onerous tax on newspaper publishing. One publisher called his paper The Political Handkerchief to avoid being classified as a newspaper. Such papers provided raucous sensationalism and politics at a cheap price.

Like their historical antecedents, modern zines encounter special problems with distribution due to their quasi-legal or nonestablished nature. The local zine Blackstockings, by and about sex-trade workers, is not to be found outside a few pockets of liberality such as Pistil Books. For many other zines, local small businesses, which thrive in the densely populated urban villages of the Seattle area, allow distribution. Independent shops, cafes, mom-and-pop groceries, restaurants, real-estate agents, etc., may even support a zine by buying an ad. Free publications and small businesses are sometimes in a sort of symbiotic relationship. Zines can attract customers to a coffeehouse. (For an idea of the range of zines you can find locally, see accompanying article "Land of a Thousand Zines")

On the other hand, chain stores are usually anathema to zines. You're obviously not going to see the activist Washington Free Press distributed in a Starbucks cafe or in a climate-controlled shopping mall full of chain stores. Likewise, Starbucks or Nordstrom would probably never dream of advertising in the Free Press, which has been the first local paper to criticize the recent activities of both companies.

The Free Press has certainly had its share of distribution problems with chain stores and cantankerous shopkeepers. Our emphasis on labor coverage probably doesn't help. We've been recently refused by the Taco Del Mar central management, the Pagliacci Pizza central management, and the Alki Bakery. These places do, however, carry other free publications that are apparently more respectable than the Free Press.

So in a very practical sense, when we at the Free Press print articles critical of large corporate entities, chain stores, and the narrow-minded, we are fighting for our own livelihood. When the whole of the world has been bought by Disney Corporation and Microsoft, there may be no place left to distribute the Free Press.

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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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