Remember the short-lived, conservative, alt-newspaper The Utah Weekly? Of course not.
Small Lake City
By Bill Frost @bill_frost
As you know, Salt Lake City Weekly is currently celebrating 40 years of publishing. Wes Long has been going hard into the paper's history with his City Weekly Rewind series—he's even mentioned me as one of the lone visionaries writing about TV entertainment in the alt-weekly universe ("visionary" being my description, not his, but I'm sure that's what he meant).
There have been a few upstart competitors to City Weekly over those four decades. Such as the long-dead The Event (which actually came before the Private Eye, CW's original incarnation), The Salt Lake Tribune's dismal In Utah This Week faux-weekly (later Now In Utah This Week, which really helped), and the so-forgotten-it-may-not-have-existed Salt Lake Observer (like the New York Observer, but worse).
But the most hilariously doomed challenger of them all was The Utah Weekly, a "conservative" alternative weekly launched in 2002. Alternative to what? Utah was at the time—and arguably still is—95% conservative.
It's like Republicans who bitch about their "voices being silenced" while yakking 24/7 on right-wing TV, radio, podcasts, news sites and everywhere else. Poor, muzzled, red-hatters.
"What's happening is advertisers are wasting their money, I think, advertising in a newspaper that is in distribution points where some families go in, and maybe Mom looks at it and says, 'I'm turning this over.' It's quite prevalent," The Utah Weekly's Rich Kuchinsky told Deseret News in 2002. "They won't do that with ours. We will be a hard-hitting, good, clean paper that will carry non-offensive ads."
First of all, City Weekly's ads have never been on the front of the paper. If "Mom" turned the paper over on the rack, she'd get a faceful of "offensive" back-page ads for psychic readings, snowboard trade-ins and "Back, Crack & Sac Wax" (OK, I'll concede that one).
Secondly, The Utah Weekly may have been "clean" (when the cheap ink wasn't permeating your hands), but it was far from "hard-hitting" or even "good." And, most egregiously for an alleged alt-weekly, it was utterly devoid of humor. Even those self-righteous hippies at The Austin Chronicle know how to have a laugh—but only one per week, and it's usually about hazy IPAs.
The Utah Weekly didn't last long, disappearing as inconspicuously as it had arrived. Turns out, there wasn't an overwhelming demand for a conservative alt-weekly to counter the "liberal" damage to society that City Weekly had wrought. CW Grand Poobah John Saltas has eaten baklava over the bones of many a newspaper enemy, but The Utah Weekly was the least consequential of them all.
Now excuse me while I turn to this issue's City Weekly Rewind to see if Wes Long has any further praise for me. (See? Gotta have that humor.)
Small Lake City is home to local writers and their opinions.
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