Quill
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6th September 2026
State of the Alt: As local print media hits hard times, alternative weeklies morph into papers of record
June 19, 2026 • Quill Archives
Or, as is more often the case these days, formerly cohabited.
Few of today’s monikers are as colorful as the long-gone Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, or the Weekly Volcano, still being published in Tacoma, Washington. But the Flagpole, founded in 1987 in Athens, Georgia, does pretty well. Its publisher, Alicia Nickles, says it was named after the founding staff’s propensity for “running ideas up the flagpole to see who salutes.”
“We had an insurance salesman...