cowpies and roadkill are excluded from this offer
essential and quintessential

The Utne Reader used to appeal to me as a youth, and I was a regular reader. Perhaps I'm too bitter and burnt-out for its left-leaning utopianism, but it doesn't really do anything for me these days. However, I do enjoy its annual Independent Press Awards for pointers to other publications of merit. I'm pleased to see personal fave ReadyMade magazine getting a couple of nods for "Design" and "Personal Life Coverage."

Okay, I'm going to get a little more picky. The Independent Press Awards seemed to be more of a serious recognition of independent publishing, listing nominees and bracketing off major categories by circulation. It used to feature more 'zines, as well as publications like Punk Planet, with cultural agendas far more serious than ReadyMade's. Rather than a serious recognition of independent publishing, it resembles the soft features - like Enterprise Systems' "Power 100," - I used to write.

Posted by McChris at January 13, 2004 01:21 AM
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Back in my zine-immersed pre-web days, Utne Reader always seemed too bland and edgeless to me. I preferred something more antisocially punk/anarchist/SubGenius on the one hand or radically utopian/Green on the other. The common description at the time was that the Utnes had started a "Reader's Digest of the alternative press" and I think the comparison was apt, not only because they anthologized material from various sources but because they homogenized it into an unobjectionable world-view in the process.

Posted by: Prentiss Riddle at January 22, 2004 10:01 AM
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