(An excerpt from a speech I gave to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Madison, Wisconsin on July 11, 2025.)
I want to close out with some thoughts on this liminal space between print and online we have all been trying to navigate for a pretty long time now, and where I think it might be heading.
I think it’s fair to say that things aren’t great right now. haven’t been for awhile. There are a lot of AAN papers that have gone to that great recycling bin in the sky. print editions are a lot thinner than they used to be. some papers have gone online-only. and yet … maybe I’m being overly optimistic — a thing I am definitely known for — but I feel like this is a really promising moment for an altweekly resurgence.
For one thing, there’s a palpable hunger for voices of opposition to the maga shitshow, and god knows democrats and the mainstream media have not been up to the task. Don’t even get me started on the New York Times, which just last week fell for yet another Chris Rufo psy-op. And meanwhile the internet is consuming itself. It’s filled with clickbait garbage and a.i. slop and a.i. slop training on clickbait garbage and it’s getting worse every day. It’s just an increasingly unpleasant experience, we all know that.
And beyond all that I think there’s a yearning among younger people for the analog era they never got to experience.
My 20-something son — who, incidentally, owes his very existence to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies — I’m sure he would thank you all profusely, if he were here this afternoon — recently looked around my living room, which is overflowing with books and comics and vinyl albums and said, wistfully, that nobody his age will ever have a room like that.
I really think there’s an opportunity here that you could lean into. Not in some self-conscious retro hipster way. Just own it. We’re here, we’re analog, to some degree still, and we’re not going away. Be the alternative. Be the alternative in 2025, to this hellscape that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Sam Altman and the rest of those assholes are forcing down our throats.
Obviously none of us can ignore the internet. It’s never going to be 1995 again. Realistically most of our audience is probably still going to be online, at least until a.i. makes the internet completely unusable. which may be sooner than later. But there’s a big difference between the way people engage with a print newspaper, and the way they engage with something on their phone. Nobody sits down with their phone and reads an issue cover to cover. Mostly, they follow a link in, they scroll through an article, and then they bounce out again. And with google increasingly prioritizing their own a.i. summaries of your work, over actual links to your work, even that limited engagement is going to be a thing of the past soon.
These are not hopeful times, in so many ways, and yet … I am asking you to remain hopeful. To remain true to your alternative roots. To keep in mind that what you are doing matters. Adversarial local journalism matters, now more than ever. Local culture reporting matters. The community you create by doing these things matters. It matters, as much as it ever did back in the early altweekly days, to have an independent alternative media, as the billionaire-owned papers compete with one another to see who can bend the knee most subserviently to Donald J. Trump.
Oh and one final thought, run some cartoons. Trust me on this, people like the cartoons. they’re like the little dab of peanut butter on the mouse trap. they lure people in. If I had a nickel for every time someone has said, I always used to pick up the paper to see your cartoon, I would have a very large pile of nickels. Which might come in handy, given what trump is doing to the economy.
And, that’s what I’ve got for you.
Thanks for your attention. Thank you so much for doing the work you do. And thanks for giving me a pretty decent life. I couldn’t have done it without you.