Milwaukee's print publications have it rough. Many have talked about publishing the next big thing, but their lifespan becomes a flash in the pan, and "stop the presses!" is shouted early in the game.

After all, calling your magazine "cool" is about the most uncool thing you can do, as Milwaukee readers are a fickle bunch. They can shun the media conglomerates who try to reach the younger generation, just as they can ignore the little indies who put out their rag on a lark. Throughout the years, readers have shown their tastes while publishers have sold ads, printed new products and challenged saturation points in this competitive market.

But all the same, Brew City's seen some fine (and some not so fine) reading material, so OMC decided to reminisce about yesteryear's print and Web publications that just couldn't cut the mustard.

From 1967-'69, progressive Milwaukeeans turned to the pages of Kaleidoscope for a weekly dose of counterculture. After a few years of multiple mimeographed attempts to take its place, The Bugle American blew onto the scene.

The Bugle American ran from 1972-'77 and was created in various Riverwest flats. In 1978, the name was shortened to simply The Bugle, but by the next year, the paper was so over you could almost hear "Taps" playing along Center Street.

In the '80s, the presses really began to heat up. In '82, The Crazy Shepherd (mistakenly titled The Crazy Shepard for its debut issue!) was born, named after a line in Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." Single Life magazine, a bimonthly publication edited by Gail Rose, for unmarried, separated, divorced and widowed men and women, came into existence that same year.

Whereas Single Life kept its name until its demise in the '90s, The Crazy Shepherd, which was quickly shortened to The Shepherd, experienced a name change at just about every pile on the path.

In 1987, The Shepherd merged with The Express, a local paper founded by Dave Luhrssen and Mark Shurilla, and became the Shepherd Express. Then, in 1999, the Shepherd Express merged again, this time with the Metro, and became the Shepherd Express Metro.

The Metro had a transient existence before shacking up with the Shep. It began in the late '80s as the Dateline Downtown and then switched to the Downtown Edition, which became The City Edition, which became The Paper, which became The Metro Paper.

Of course, the oldest pubs to merge are The Milwaukee Journal, first published in 1882, and the Milwaukee Sentinel, out in 1837. The two joined forces in 1995, and it was bye-bye Green Sheet. They've launched and pulled back a number of publications, most recently on the Web, including CityPagesPlus and the reportedly waning onwisconsin.com (launched first in the mid-'90s as a paid part of the Journal Sentinel, then taken down, then re-launched as their entertainment Web site (onwisconsin.com/live), and now removed from the paper's masthead in favor of jsonline.com.) Their next attempt to gain younger readers and stop their circulation free-fall is another weekly print publication, targeting 25-34 year-olds, called MKE. It arrives during the same week in which a Gallup poll found that fewer than a third of young people read newspapers and magazines.

In 1984, David Iraci and Ron Geiman, after stints in the military, founded the LGBT magazine WisconsIN Step. It later was named Wisconsin In Step, or In Step for short. Recently, the pub quietly exited stage left.

Art Muscle splatter-painted the scene in 1986. Frank Lewis founded the bimonthly arts and entertainment mag and served as the first editor. It was arguably the first magazine of its size to cover the local arts scene and featured an impressive calendar of events. By the mid-'90s, however, the Muscle turned to flab.

Somewhere in the midst of it all, the suburban papers also merged. The once-known Shorewood Herald, Whitefish Bay Herald, etc. were glommed together by CNI (Community Newspapers, Inc.) into a few circulars covering chunks of suburbia. CNI itself was later gobbled up by Journal Communications depriving the city of another independent media voice.

The late-'90s and early millennium brought a glut of independent 'zines, including Marti Graham's Loose, The Orbit, Nerve, The Press and Josh Modell's super-sharp Milk Magazine. Milk, like the Irish American Post, does continue to maintain a Web presence despite discontinuing its print publication. There was also the New Community Newletter, the official organ of a cooperative group of local bands that booked gigs, shared rehearsal space and published one of Milwaukee's best music 'zines of the decade. Although all of the aforementioned were respected and noteworthy, none are still in print.

It was around this time that Milwaukee Web sites started to crop up, like cityonthelake.com, mke1.com and newmilwaukee.com. Like the publications discovered, there is only room for a few good reads in this town, whether cyber or paper.

These are just a few examples of the many magazines, newspapers, 'zines and Web sites that have attempted to make it in Milwaukee. Sadly, most are destined to flatten flies or swirl down the cyber drain.