Eye Weekly and Now enjoy sneering at the MSM, but when it comes to holding onto their own audiences, they aren't doing much better.

From Saturday's Globe and Mail:

... The Print Measurement Bureau, the non-profit organization that tracks data on print media readership, released its 2008 study, showing a 14.2-per-cent drop in Now's readership.

For Eye Weekly, Now's Torstar-owned rival, the 2008 numbers were even worse - a drop of 16 per cent. Both of the city's alt-weeklies have been shedding readers steadily since 2004, according to PMB, with Eye losing a full third of its readership since then.

While it's difficult to get through a day without reading about the death of the entire print industry, alt-weeklies are a particular case. Entirely reliant on advertising revenues, their revenue is not augmented by subscriptions or newsstand sales. At the same time, they're threatened by a panoply of other free offerings.

"The alt-weeklies are facing competition [for readers] from two sides, the free commuter papers like 24 and Metro, and the Internet," says Marco Ursi, editor of Masthead, a trade publication that covers Canada's magazine industry.

Since Now and Eye made their debuts (in 1981 and 1991 respectively), the media universe has grown more competitive. Where alt-weeklies used to be the near-exclusive province of far-left voices, the blogosphere now offers a ceaseless stream of pink-tinged commentary. Daily news sites such as Torontoist.com fill the niche of intensely local reporting, and music sites such as Pitchfork and PopMatters have supplanted Now and Eye as cultural tastemakers.

With such a fractured landscape, it's not clear what the alt-weeklies are an alternative to.

In the United States, media concentration has stripped the alternative weeklies of their personality. The venerable Village Voice, once a model for Now, has become such a shadow of its former self that ex-staffers refer to it as the PTSNBN - the Paper That Shall Not Be Named. A blog called Alt-Weekly Death Watch, devoted to "the death spiral of the American alternative weekly," launched in 2006.

The situation is not as grave in Toronto, but Now and Eye are nonetheless scrambling to reinvent themselves.

So, readership is down. How about the revenue?

Despite plunging readership, advertising revenue is up at both papers. According to Masthead, Now brought in $12.8-million in ad revenue in 2007 while Eye earned about $5.7-million, a 29-per-cent and 14-per-cent respective increase from the previous year.

The advertisements that still work best for Eye and Now are the familiar, colourful massage parlour and escort ads that dominate the back pages of both papers. As Mr. Keenan puts it, "We're not so good at retail advertising, but we're really good at adult classifieds."

Despite constant pressure to eliminate the ads - from readers, other advertisers and, occasionally, editors - Mr. Hollett justifies their inclusion by saying that they permit a safer work environment for prostitutes. He refuses to divulge how much of Now's advertising revenue these ads generate.

Unlike its competitor, Now refuses to advertise tobacco, a controversial category that returned to the pages of Eye (as well as other weeklies in Vancouver and Montreal) last year, raising the ire of, among others, former contributor Warren Kinsella.

Part of the problem with Now and Eye is I know what they're going to say before they even say it -- although frankly, that's a problem with many publications.

I suspect they've simply fallen into comfortable, creative ruts and need new blood to get out of them.

I haven't studied Now's website excessively, but I just surfed over to check out some of their 'interact with this story, Web-2.0 bells and whistles, and it appears those bells are going unrung and the whistles unblown.

At other times, I've looked on their blog posts, and it's mainly Now staff commenting on each others' staff.

Not a good sign.

The G&M story's closer?

Neither weekly has plans to abandon newsprint. Mr. Hollett argues that both mediums can happily co-exist, drawing an analogy to the music industry. "People still like albums," he says. "CDs they don't care about. Digital and albums will survive, CDs will disappear."

However, Mr. (Edward) Keenan (Eye's city and food editor) isn't quite as sanguine: "We keep asking, how do we reinvent ourselves? But maybe we should stop trying to be the best of a dying species."

Maybe it's not the medium. Maybe it's the content.