Concerning younger readership: Something I have yet to understand is how the MSM (assuming they get younger readers through faux-alts) hopes to get that same audience to read the regular daily paper. Is that even their goal? Do they expect kids to one day say “I’m too mature for Orange, so I’ll drop a quarter into this machine and buy the Trib”?

Seems like too much to hope for, especially if they’re going to be half-ass about it. If they were going to put that little effort into Orange, they shouldn’t have bothered making it a print publication and instead made it online-only.

This sidesteps the issue of whether alts should or shouldn’t be running adult-oriented advertising. Which really, I think, is more a moral argument than a demographic or financial one.

Wayne, are you implying the barechested guy, holding the football, really isn’t a massage therapist?

Alon Levy did a critique at Lindsay Beyerstein’s blog. All her blogger should read it. This is my favorite bad pieice of bad writing Alon pulled from the infamous homeless beat down post.

“the light at Mastry’s flickered an excellent, sexy pale blue onto her hair, like she was in a video game where she was, like, the leader of a gang of fierce cougar-girl mutants or something.”

http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/01/blogger_rachel_.html#comment-27993149

Other alt-weeklies have dropped “whore” ads altogether because they essentially cater to an older demographic — men 50 and up who can’t get laid, not exactly the young readership weeklies vie for.

Here’s an AAN blurb about Boston’s Weekly Dig, who dropped the ads not too long ago:

“Jeff Lawrence (pictured) could care less that some law enforcement officials think escort ads are a front for prostitution. According to a recent piece in E&P, the president of Boston’s Weekly Dig decided to remove the ads from his paper because he thought they were attracting too many 50-year-old white male suburbanites. “It’s no different than if we started running ads for Geritol or Depends adult diapers,” Lawrence tells E&P. “In terms of attracting readers, content is one thing, but the advertisements, too, are huge part of determining whether your readers are going to respond to your paper.” Lawrence says the Dig also is considering whether to drop a couple of other categories that may not belong in the paper. “Advertisers like that you’re protecting your demographic,” he says, “They say, ‘You’re willing to give up revenue to stay on mission — that’s fantastic.’”