Leave it to David Carr. After reading about dailies folding left and right, and particularly after reading Clay Shirky's sharp essay last week, the question I kept asking myself and others was: What about alt-weeklies? How are they doing? Can they become like the dailies of the 21st century?

I was particularly interested in locally owned, locally produced alt-weeklies like The Stranger in Seattle — as opposed to those weeklies put out by Village Voice Media: City Pages, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly, etc. National retread crap with only a few local voices.

So here comes Carr, with his Monday Media Equation column, answering, on a singular scale anyway, my very question. The Austin Chronicle, founder of South by Southwest, is doing very well thank you. Money quote:

“We don’t do gotcha journalism, our coverage is very policy-oriented, and always local, local, local,” [Chronicle founder Louis Black] said. “Even during the Bush years, which were a very big deal here, we never put anybody that wasn’t local on the cover. We don’t do out-of-towners."

The new model? 

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