THREE STARS PLUS. I congratulate my friends who are keeping on keeping on at The Weekly, but just…read moreas with so many community newspapers, The Weekly's become a ghost of its former self, even more so of Tucson's late City magazine that was a paragon of community journalism. The ad revenues, all gone digital, just aren't there to support a lot of innovation. The online The Range, a summary of The Weekly, has better comments.
However, editor in chief Jim Nintzel (whom I consider a friend), a talk-radio personality and former public TV reporter, is digging up plenty of new writing talent and reaching into Tucson's past to retrieve writers and contributors who, resigned to writing books and other such distractions from real journalism, remain eager to give it a go.
That's something....
Of course, the food and music reviews are still competent. And so long as The Weekly contains Free Will Astrology and Savage Love, there's reliably entertaining substance. Plus, where else can you find out about most of what's happening in town -- music, art, and annual rituals? (Tucson lives for its rituals and its past, a constant deterrent to a lively contemporary political press.)
The Weekly's biggest problem is its publisher, which rescued the Weekly but mainly publishes the glitzier, much thicker BizTucson and a rash of other Chamber of Commerce-suitable rags. It doesn't think kindly -- if it it thinks at all -- of restoring Tucson to its happier, hippier days. It's into building skyscrapers and defense-money and real-estate plays to kickstart Tucson's weak (some say, waning) economy. Like the bourgeois liberals who run the town, this publisher's into importing students to fill the new high-rise condos and bars and rent-a-workplaces "revitalizing" -- by redeveloping -- the historical Downtown, and all that sort of stuff. But the Weekly's plethora of medical marijuana ads is just too enticing.
It's a self-contradictory situation. Not a kind environment for hard-hitting, critical, creative journalism. But The Weekly does the best it can, which is pretty good. I hope there's a real renaissance for it ahead in this town. Without it, we have no other real community media, only a single community radio station where vanity DJs rule the roost and community news mainly consists of a one-hour Democracy Now! feed each noon. Every bit of discourse counts.
