Only eighty-four of the twenty thousand American magazines have circulations that top a million, so most alternative magazines struggle to satisfy small but loyal groups of readers. At any given time, there are over two thousand alternative magazines in circulation, with many failing and others starting up every month.

Alternative magazines have historically defined themselves in terms of politics—published either by the Left (the Progressive, In These Times, the Nation) or the Right (the National Review, American Spectator, Insight). However, what constitutes an alternative magazine has broadened over time to include just about any publication considered “outside the mainstream,” ranging from environmental magazines to alternative lifestyle magazines to punk-zines—the magazine world’s answer to punk rock. (Zines, pronounced “zeens,” is a term used to describe self-published magazines.) Utne Reader, widely regarded as “the Reader’s Digest of alternative magazines,” has defined alternative as any sort of “thinking that doesn’t reinvent the status quo, that broadens issues you might see on TV or in the daily paper.”

Occasionally, alternative magazines have become marginally mainstream. For example, during the conservative Reagan era in the 1980s, William F. Buckley’s National Review saw its circulation swell to more than 100,000—enormous by alternative standards. By 2013, the magazine continued to be the leading conservative publication, with a circulation of 150,000. On the Left, Mother Jones (named after labor organizer Mary Harris Jones), which champions muckraking and investigative journalism, had a circulation of 240,000 in 2013.

Most alternative magazines, however, are content to swim outside the mainstream. These are the small magazines that typically include diverse political, cultural, religious, international, and environmental subject matter, such as Against the Current, BadAzz MoFo, Buddhadharma, Home Education Magazine, Jewish Currents, Small Farmer’s Journal, and Humor Times.