Local Newspaper Empire Stages Shotgun Wedding

Tacoma’s “alternative” Volcano will now be folded into the Fort Lewis Ranger. It’s a family affair.

The shocking news broke in June on Kevin Freitas’s blog KFnetinttown: “The print and web edition of the Weekly Volcano is closing.” But the news wasn’t exactly true. Tacoma’s scrappiest newspaper, which started as the Fort Lewis Ranger’s arts section in 2001 and became a full-fledged alternative newsweekly in 2008, simply killed its news section and hopped back into the mother paper’s marsupial pouch as an arts section once more.

In fact, the Volcano has always been included with the Ranger, so all it lost was its expensive independent distribution and news pages. The Volcano Spew blog was only dormant a few days; co-owner Ron Swarner, retooling his web strategy, handed Volcano print responsibilities over to editor Matt Driscoll.

“It was Tacoma’s last best hope for an ‘edgy’ alternative press,” grieves the paper’s acerbic cartoonist RR Anderson, whose Tacomic strip got axed. “The Volcano alternative newspaper experiment is over.” Retorts Driscoll, “If anything, this is the most interesting and challenging time of our ‘experiment.’” The Volcano is Swarner’s baby, and once recession recedes and ad reps hit a certain quota, editor Driscoll says Swarner has vowed to give the paper back its independence.

“The idea is to weather the storm,” says Driscoll. “I have no doubt the Ranger/Volcano combo is going to weird a bunch of people out. How could it not?” Anderson snipes, “Nothing says arts and entertainment like dudes in camo chopping man-shaped targets in half with automatic assault rifles.”

“The two voices are like oil and water,” says one insider. The Volcano targets irreverent hipsters; the Ranger, whose title is an acronym for its 103,000 Regular Army, National Guard, Enlisted and Reserve readers, is a kind of hyperspecialized community newspaper. The Volcano and its Spew blog exist to challenge authority; the Ranger blog, “Blog-ah! Standing at Attention to Serve You!” puns on the soldier’s obedient expletive, “Hooah,” which means a particularly heartfelt “Yessir!”

Until now, Driscoll has had remarkable freedom to criticize the military and other local potentates. “We would never print a story that’s disrespectful to our troops,” he says. “We have printed stories that are critical of war efforts.” The Tacomic comic strip, however, was a looser cannon than any on the base. One Tacomic covered Ehren Watada, court-martialed for refusing to go to Iraq. But another strip that bashed a Ranger-sponsored air show (jets buzzing the Spanish Steps homeless were labeled “Corporate Welfare”) got spiked. Anderson draws the Volcano as a bulldog on a short leash held by Gen. MacArthur, labeled “Military-industrial complex.”

Driscoll, a left-leaning Evergreen grad, says, “Who better to be producing content read by a large percentage of military folks in the South Sound than a bunch of liberal tree huggers?” He thinks the military issue won’t likely come up in an arts paper.

“The chances of us printing something critical of the military are pretty remote,” he continues. “If ever there is a story that we feel might piss off Fort Lewis, we can pull that story from issues to be delivered on base. We’ve done this on a number of occasions, but usually it’s only for sexy stuff. Since the Ranger is mailed to every household on Fort Lewis, the powers that be frown on too much sexual content.”

The Ranger/Volcano could very well be the oddest media couple in American journalism, and it raises a vexed question: what is an alternative weekly? “What was alternative ten years ago is irrelevant,” says Mark Hanzlik, executive director of Alternative Weekly Network, which represents small papers, including the Volcano and over a hundred others. “Distribution method doesn’t matter. We love the Volcano’s quirkiness. They’re not going to sell out or write for the mass population. Even if it’s inside the Ranger, if five thousand of those get read by hip people, then they’re still reaching the right audience.”

Besides, sometimes military people are just hipsters who got a solid job and a severe haircut. And as teen Leah King’s recent overdose death at Fort Lewis shows, military and civilian youth culture do intersect.

“It really comes down to editorial independence,” says Jason Zaragoza of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, a trade organization whose member papers are seen as “a valuable alternative to the mainstream media.” AAN forbids “faux alternatives” from joining — those not judged “independent” enough. AAN represents 131 elite weeklies, bigger fish in bigger markets than some of the members of the more grassroots Alternative Weekly Network. “If they’re pulling a lot of punches all of a sudden under this new format, that would be something people would take a look at [before letting them
into AAN].”

“My skin crawls when I hear that — ‘What is alternative?’” says AAN member Tim Keck, publisher of Seattle’s Stranger. “It comes up at every convention.” He defines “alterna-weekly” thus: “Aw . . . lefty news and a calendar, and it’s mostly arts and entertainment, and they probably use swear words. That’s probably as close as it comes. Or you can say it’s a paper that runs Dan Savage.”

Yet while AAN began in 1978 as an alternative to the monopolistic dailies, now dailies are dying much faster than the weeklies, which seem hardy as cockroaches in the newspaper industry apocalypse. Now is no time for elitism, Keck says. “Every year, I vote for everybody to get in. If somebody wants to be part of our organization, we should be excited.”

“The Volcano was and is alternative,” says Driscoll, “meaning it’s an alternative to mainstream journalism. We printed and will continue to print stories that the mainstream media in this area wouldn’t touch. This means far more to me than paying AAN dues. If you want to read about a local band from the South Sound, that article is going to be in the Volcano. The major outlets are too busy reviewing America’s Got Talent and the recent Jonas Brothers show at the T-Dome.”

Despite the downsizing — or because of it — could the Volcano survive while giants like The Seattle Times and Boston Globe fold? “Absolutely,” says Driscoll. Survival is the ultimate alternative. “I’m not very interested in defining what it is we do,” he continues. “Just publishing quality content about stories you’re not going to read anywhere else. Call that whatever you want.”