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Bloomington Alternative

November 20th, 2009 by Goby

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Written not so much as a blog, but rather as an online newspaper, The Bloomington Alternative is a website committed to independent journalism and progressive social change in both Bloomington, Indiana and America at large. Left leaning and focused on uncovering local stories, The Bloomington Alternative is your kinder, gentler muckraker for the new century.

The format of The Bloomington Alternative doesn’t invite readers to dive right into their content. There is a large leader at the top of the homepage, but you must click “read more” to finish the story. Two shorter leaders are posted below it, but again, you must “read more,” a difficult decision when the leader is written in such a manner that you aren’t sure what the rest of the content of the article will be. Below these leaders are banners for further stories in that bi-monthly edition. Recent edition headlines are archived underneath that. Therefore it is possible to look at the entire homepage without actually reading an entire story. Busy readers many just pass The Bloomington Alternative on by.

The tone set by the writers of The Bloomington Alternative is nothing if not irreverent. The simple inclusion of profanities in the subheading of an article style shows the reader that alternative news apparently translates to less professional news. While journalism free from corporate dollars and editorializing is important, it is also important to keep alternative news as professional and traditional sources. The blog looses much of the legitimacy it is trying to garner through a newspaper-like format because of the casual tone of the writers. Comparing the DNR to pestilential insects is not a way to evoke confidence from your readers. At the same time, the editorial section reads like a Twitter posting.

Reading The Bloomington Alternative has been very frustrating because of their format and the impudent tone of their writers.

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One Response

Steven Higgs writes:
November 20th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

As editor and publisher of The Bloomington Alternative, I appreciate this post and agree with much of it. The Alternative is an online newspaper and not a blog. We did in fact publish a print paper for three of our seven years publishing. While we have some items that are identified as “blogs,” all this means is that they are self-published.

While I understand the comments about the format, I personally find most “blogs” to be infuriatingly cluttered and user unfriendly, but I am an old guy struggling to keep up in a new age. As an old-line newspaper guy (I was a daily reporter from 1985-1996), I hope the comment that the leads are such that readers “aren’t sure what the rest of the content of the article will be” is wrong. Indeed, they are written and edited so that readers get the gist of the story (the news hook, to use journalistic parlance) and, hopefully, will want to know more.

As for profanity, we use it sparingly, and only when appropriate. The number of people I’ve met in my 58 years on Earth who don’t use this type of language is almost zero, so I do not accept that writing the way people talk is “less professional.” If cursing was a hallmark of our publication, I would agree that it was unprofessional. When used to make legitimate points, even in headlines, I submit it is honest journalism.

I will say that we are irreverent and impudent by design and intent. Most if not all of our writers believe that those who have corrupted our government and are destroying our culture, economy and environment for personal profit are not worthy of respect. And we don’t give it to them. If you want sanitized, he-said/she-said BS, the Alternative is not for you.

Finally, I know that some people think “left” when they read opinions like ours, but I don’t buy it. I’ve been in this business since the early 1980s, espousing effectively the same message in multiple formats and media, and I never cease to be amazed at the positive feedback I get from across the political spectrum. If you must label The Bloomington Alternative, call us radicals. I’ll wear that label with pride.

One more thing, the only people on our Web site who write under pseudonyms are those who criticize us.