RIP City Pages

A Minneapolis staple for four decades.

Another city now without a weekly alternative newspaper.

City Pages is closing, ending the era of alternative weeklies in Twin Cities

 

That sucks. Not sure if I ever glanced at City Pages when I ventured to the Twin Cities in the 1990s, but it looks like an alternative paper that actually did some digging and churned out good, investigative journalism amid the entertainment and restaurant listings.

I've seen quite a few good alt weeklies around the country, run by true believer former daily newspaper journalists with a chip on their shoulder. If COVID doesn't shut them all down, the advancing age of these owner/publishers — and the decline of print in general thanks to the internet — will probably get the rest.

 

A highlight of my Wednesdays in college in the Twin Cities in the early 90s was grabbing City Pages and the Twin Cities Reader at the campus post office/mail area.

 

I heard about this for the first time from all the people crying about it on Twitter a few days ago.

The responses that piss me off the most are those who keep asking, "How could we let something like this sink??" Well, combine lackluster sales, a global pandemic, and a city population that doesn't believe in paying to support news organization, and there's your answer.

 

Sad as it is to admit, you're 100 percent correct.

Once upon a time ... we'll call it the mid-1990s ... if you put out a free product that was popular enough, advertisers would support it financially because so many people would see it.

In 2020, that product has a name: YouTube.

 

Dang, thought this was going to be a thread about the Blazers.

 

Sad stuff.

a lot of alt weeklies survived, yes, on absolutely tireless, often fearless culture writers who could would call shit shit if they thought it was shit and knew about show in town, and the right investigative types, a little conspiracy-minded, who’d ferret out a city corruption while tilting, just a little bit, at windmills.

The Internet - particularly social media - changed a lot of that.

 

I pre-date City Pages there by a few years, so I was Reader reader.

The internet collapsed the alt-weekly business model, and it never really recovered.

Rest in peace, Sweet Potato.