Alternative and Indie Magazines

Overview

“Alternative” and “independent,” or “indie,” can be nebulous terms when it comes to publishing. In periodicals, it generally refers to smaller or “little” magazines , those not owned by large mass media corporations (in contrast with the periodicals owned by Time, Gannett, or Conde Nast, for instance), and in many cases, those not carried in most bookstores or newsstands. That last criterion is not always true—some independent magazines, such as McSweeney’s or the Utne Reader, have become relatively easy to find, while specialty magazines owned by large corporations may be more scarce. Although the two terms are largely used interchangeably, “independent” refers to the ownership and operation of the magazine, while “alternative” usually indicates a difference in focus and content from that of the larger magazines. As such, alternative magazines have formed an important part of American cultural history by providing a platform for marginalized voices or discussion of specialized topics, which was particularly vital in the pre-internet age.

Magazines and newspapers are both periodical publications. Traditionally printed, commercially produced magazines that are also published digitally are common. Periodicals, whether digital or print, are generally funded with a combination of advertising and prepaid subscriptions. While magazines are commonly associated with glossy paper and full-color printing, and newspapers with black and white and color newsprint, indie magazines are often printed more cheaply, and many long-lived magazines like The Nation are published in newsprint. While distinctions can also be drawn between the in-depth feature coverage of a magazine and the daily or weekly reporting of a newspaper, or between the size and binding of pages, these distinctions are porous as well. Some publications discussed here could be considered either magazines or newspapers, or have varied in publication type over the course of their histories.

In the English-speaking world, magazines date to the early eighteenth century, with magazines for the general public (rather than scholars) becoming especially popular throughout the West in the nineteenth century. In the United States, most popular magazines are published monthly; in the alternative press, quarterly and bimonthly publication is common. News magazines, such as Time, Newsweek, and The Nation, have traditionally been published weekly; in the alternative press, this role is usually occupied by “alt weeklies,” local or regional weekly newspapers such as the Village Voice (1955–2018), the Boston Phoenix (1966–2013), or the Chicago Reader (1971–). Magazines have traditionally served important roles in cultural discourse and the publishing world, with several major magazines serving as outlets for public debate about issues like slavery, women’s rights, American involvement in foreign wars, labor rights, immigration, sexuality, and religion. The advent of the telegraph and the spread of the railroad helped propel the popularity of magazines over the nineteenth century, as distribution became easier and news traveled more quickly. After World War II, electronics and air travel made magazines even cheaper to produce and distribute at the same time other technological advances—radio, movies, and especially television—drew readers away.

While the widespread adoption of digital media has been largely perceived as contributing to the decline of print magazines, independent print magazines experienced a rise in the 2010s. The same internet access that drew readers away from some magazines also made it easier for new magazines to reach out to potential readers, build community, and crowdfund their expenses through services like Kickstarter. Prominent magazines launched in the new era include, for example, one for women in the food industry titled Cherry Bombe; the typography magazine Gratuitous Type; the soccer magazine Howler; Hello Mr., a principally apolitical magazine for gay twentysomething men; the urban surfing magazine Wax; the women’s fashion magazine The Gentlewoman; and the “slow lifestyle” magazine Kinfolk.

Further Insights

Several alternative or independent magazines are worth drawing attention to because of the influence they have had on the field or in American culture, or because they are representative of a particular niche in magazine publishing. The Utne Reader was founded in 1984, named for founder Eric Utne. It reprints writing from other alternative periodicals, primarily in culture and politics, with a small amount of original material and reviews. Published quarterly, it has become one of the most prominent alternative magazines and an amplifier of important voices in the culture; it was one of the first national magazines to report in-depth on the “New Age men’s movement” of the 1980s and 1990s (also known as the mythopoetic men’s movement and inspired by works such as Robert Bly’s 1990 book Iron John). Since 1989, the Utne Reader has awarded the Independent Press Awards (originally the Alternative Press Awards) in a variety of categories, including General Excellence awards in the Magazine, Newsweekly, and Newsletter categories, Best New Title, and genre-specific writing and reporting awards. Sample writing from award winners is often published in a subsequent issue of the magazine. The magazine ceased publication in 2019 and transitioned to a new form. It became a digital digest of articles.

The Columbia Journalism Review was founded by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1961. A nonprofit periodical supported by donations, it is the preeminent magazine about American journalism, media ethics, and media trends. Like many independent periodicals in the digital age, it reduced publication to twice a year to focus on online content and inaugurated a weekly podcast, The Kicker.

Adbusters, based in Canada, was founded in 1989 as a social activist and culture jamming organization. It is usually described as anti-capitalist, though the magazine itself rarely identifies with that term, focusing on consumerism more than the overall capitalist picture and influenced by the Situationist movement. As the title indicates, Adbusters is vigilantly anti-advertising, positioning the advertising industry as the main pillar holding up consumerist culture.

Founded in 2003, The Believer was one of several magazines published by Dave Eggers’s small but energetic press, McSweeney’s, until 2015, when it relocated to the Black Mountain Institute associated with the University of Nevada. A bimonthly magazine of essays and criticism, it is principally associated with Generation X “hipsters,” having published work by Eugene Mirman and Tom Lennon in addition to columns by Amy Sedaris, Nick Hornby, and Greil Marcus, with illustrations by Charles Burn, Tony Millionaire, and Gilbert Hernandez. Its colorful, illustration-rich layouts and square-bound format with heavy-stock paper has become the standard followed by many alternative magazines, including the food and cooking magazine also previously published by McSweeney’s, Lucky Peach (2011–2017). McSweeney's regained ownership of the magazine in 2022.

The Oxford American, published by the Oxford Literary Project, was launched in 1989 in Oxford, Mississippi, and is the preeminent literary magazine for Southern writing. It has temporarily ceased publication several times due to funding issues, with its resumption assisted on one occasion by Oxford resident and bestselling author John Grisham. It has been beset by several scandals in the twenty-first century, including the discovery of embezzling in 2008 and the firing of founder and editor Marc Smirnoff over allegations of sexual harassment in 2012. Nevertheless, the magazine remains well regarded, notable for its annual music and food-themed issues.

A four-time winner of Utne’s Independent Press Award, the American Scholar has been published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. Named for the 1837 speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the quarterly magazine is devoted to Emersonian thinking and world affairs.

A subcategory of the independent magazine is the zine (short for magazine). Originally coined in reference to science fiction fanzines (zines produced within and for a fan community), “zine” has come to encompass a variety of small self-published magazines. Usually the product of a single person or a small group of people, a zine can be a one-off pamphlet or a regular periodical, and is now recognized as the predecessor of the blog (and an influence on the podcast). While no formal definition of a zine exists, it is usually considered a magazine with a distribution less than 1,000. Zines were the primary medium of community and communication for many subcultures of the late twentieth century; categories reviewed by Factsheet Five, an influential zine-review periodical in the 1980s and 1990s, included grrrlz (as in feminist punk rock group Riot Grrrls), queer, punk, quirky, fringe, and comix, among others. The “personal” category is especially important: many zines were the product of a single person writing or drawing about whatever moved them at the time. The production of zines was assisted by cheap desktop publishing software and widely available affordable copying. Zines are conceptually related both to chapbooks—short one-off publications of about 40 pages—and publications by “Amateur Press Associations” (APAs). APAs are, in essence, small magazines whose readers are also the contributors: each contributor submits multiple copies of their work to a distribution manager who assembles the zine from those copies and redistributes the resulting collection to all participants. APAs originated in the late nineteenth century among amateur printers, but became most associated with music, gaming, and genre fandom in the mid- to late twentieth century. The comics APA APA-5 included Frank Miller and Paul Chadwick as contributors, and led to the founding of Dark Horse Comics in 1986.

Issues

The alternative press has long been home to magazines serving marginalized groups and political subcultures. Noteworthy far-left magazines in the United States include The Anvil (broadly socialist, 1933–1935), which was folded into the Partisan Review (1935–2003), which was affiliated with the Communist Party USA; Common Sense (1932–1946), which primarily published democratic socialists and progressives before being absorbed by the American Mercury, which was subsequently taken over by a conservative anti-Semitic editor who published American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell; and the progressive/socialist magazine In These Times (founded 1976), which reports on labor and justice issues and investigates corporate and state wrongdoing. The World Tomorrow (1918–1934) was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization, and was the leading voice in the American Christian socialist movement. The leading intellectual magazines of the American socialist community are generally considered to be Dissent (founded 1954) and New Politics (founded 1961); the more recently founded magazine Jacobin began publication in 2011 to provide a younger alternative less “tied to Cold War paradigms,” in the words of founder Bhakasar Sunkara.

For a variety of reasons related to American political culture, there tend to be fewer independent magazines devoted to a viewpoint further right than the American mainstream. Apart from the rise of the “alt right” in the 2010s, which is centered more on websites and podcasting than traditional publishing, the most notable examples are libertarian magazines. The best known is Reason, a monthly magazine founded in 1968 and among the most respected political magazines in the United States. Since 2017 it has hosted the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative and libertarian group blog founded in 2002 by Eugene Volokh. The left-libertarian magazine Inquiry (1977–1984) was originally published by the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute as a forum for libertarian public policy discussion. It was founded by donors Charles Koch and Ed Crane, who had also purchased the Libertarian Review, a libertarian book review magazine that had been founded in 1972 and was repositioned as a libertarian movement magazine. The Review was folded into Inquiry in 1982, though the merged periodical survived only another two years. Shortly thereafter, R. W. Bradford founded Liberty, a newsprint libertarian journal with limited color and few ads. It was laid out with off-the-shelf desktop publishing software in order to keep operating costs low. Devoted to the libertarian movement and with a particular interest in Ayn Rand, Liberty continued publishing well into the twenty-first century, becoming digital-only in 2010.

In 1969, when gays and lesbians still faced discrimination in most of the country, the Washington Blade began publication, serving the LGBT community of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. The Blade publishes local, national, and international news relevant to the community, and has been a prominent part of the discourse in the national LGBT community. Most authors in the early days used pen names to protect themselves, and it was initially distributed mainly in gay bars. In 1993, the Blade published a special 216-page edition during the Gay March on Washington. In 2008, it interviewed Senator John McCain, the first time a Republican presidential nominee was interviewed by a gay media outlet. The Blade has been subject to controversy in D.C., including criticism within the gay community for the paper’s lack of coverage of the gay African American community in the predominantly black city. It has also been accused on several occasions of outing public figures, a controversial practice. The oldest LGBT magazine, The Advocate, was founded in 1967 and is the lone surviving LGBT magazine founded before the advent of the LGBT rights movement after the 1969 Stonewall riots. Its inception was inspired by the demonstrations against police brutality in Los Angeles following a police raid on the Black Cat Tavern, and like the Blade, it was initially distributed in gay bars. By 1969, it was distributed nationally. In 1974 it was purchased by investment banker David B. Goodstein, who sought to make the magazine more accessible to the mainstream by courting traditional advertisers to replace many of the adult-oriented ads, while continuing to offer in-depth coverage of the gay rights movement and culture. Since May 2013, production of The Advocate has been outsourced to Grand Editorial, a media services contractor that also produces Out, an LGBT fashion and entertainment magazine founded in 1992.

A number of feminist magazines were founded beginning in the 1960s, including off our backs (1970–2008), a radical feminist magazine founded by a women’s collective, and the sex-positive lesbian magazine On Our Backs (1984–2006), edited by Susie Bright, as well as its companion magazine Girlfriends (1993–2006). Chrysalis (1977–1980), based in Los Angeles, and Heresies (1977–1993), based in New York, were two of the primary magazines serving the second-wave feminist movement, publishing writers like Audre Lorde, Joanna Russ, Andrea Dworkin, and Adrienne Rich, and addressing issues ranging from religion to feminist art. Feminist issues were not limited to the smaller presses, of course; notably, Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes founded Ms. magazine in 1971, which was both outspokenly feminist and commercially successful. The first issue featured Wonder Woman on the cover, the intellectual property of Warner Communications, one of the magazine’s investors. The magazine Cosmopolitan had been founded in the nineteenth century, but its modern identity dates to 1965 with the arrival of sex-positive feminist editor Helen Gurley Brown, who challenged both the patriarchal norms of mainstream American society and the values of some American feminist groups. In 1993, 23-year-old Ariel Gore launched Hip Mama, a quarterly parenting magazine that became instrumental in the articulation and popularization of modern maternal feminism.

Bibliography

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White, E. B. (2013). Transatlantic avant gardes: Little magazines and local modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.