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Underneath the dailies and the stations, Fort Wayne grew the same alternative strata as every American city of its size. The counterculture's paper was the Fort Wayne Free Press, an underground biweekly published from 1970 to 1974 by Babylon Publishers and founded by George Relue, Tom Lewandowski, Jeff Wentz, and Ted Rhodes — volunteer-staffed, intermittently scheduled in its first year, and accompanied briefly by Joaquin, a bilingual paper written and laid out by members of the city's Mexican-American community; the same years produced the entertainment paper Where It's At. The Free Press's first three years survive in Purdue Fort Wayne's Mastodon Digital Collection, the archive of a press layer that existed to oppose the war and the establishment the Journal Gazette editorialized about. The ethnic press persisted alongside: the Macedonian Tribune, noted in national reference works among the city's publications, served the Macedonian community as the German papers once had — a community-paper thread the Communities chapter carries.
The magazine layer consolidated under the same roof as the dailies. Fort Wayne Newspapers publishes the city's monthly magazine — launched as Fort Wayne Monthly in 2003, in the Standard Periodical Directory's listing, and published as Fort Wayne magazine, monthly with annual special editions — alongside Business People's FortWayne Living and the Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly, which passed to Fort Wayne Newspapers with the KPC Media acquisition of 2022. The digital transition, finally, is not a story of replacement but of redistribution: the Journal Gazette behind its paywall at fortwayne.com, the stations streaming their newscasts, and beneath them a new generation of digital-native outlets — The Local FW's subscription newsletter, Input Fort Wayne's solutions journalism, AroundFortWayne's document archive — whose daily work is mapped in the Current chapter. What the digital layer has not replaced is the thing the print layer built over 187 years: a single room, at 600 West Main Street, where the city's paper of record is still made by people who live in it. The press that began with an invited hand press in 1833 has been, at every stage since, the city's longest-running conversation with itself.
Sources: Fort Wayne Free Press reference history (1970–1974; Babylon Publishers; the founders; Joaquin; the Purdue Fort Wayne Mastodon Digital Collection); Encyclopedia.com, Fort Wayne (the Macedonian Tribune among city publications); Standard Periodical Directory, 36th edition (2013) (Fort Wayne Monthly, founded 2003, Fort Wayne Newspapers); FortWayne.com advertising record (Fort Wayne magazine, monthly, with annual editions); Dirks, Van Essen & April (October 2022) (the KPC Media acquisition, including the Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly); the Current chapter (the digital-native outlets).