Goldman Sachs, an investment firm not holding a conference next week, put together a handy primer on what to expect for 2005. And judging from analyst Peter Appert's views, it's not much.
Robinson Devor's film Police Beat, which chronicles a week in the life of an African-born Seattle bike cop, has been accepted for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition, reports the Seattle Times. Devor co-wrote the film with Charles Mudede, whose Police Beat column in The Stranger provided its inspiration. Zimbabwe-born Mudede would visit police precincts, scan the log for interesting stories, interview the cops involved and incorporate their stories into his column. The film was selected into the prestigious competition from more than 700 submissions. (Free registration required.)
On Nov. 9, America's second-largest newspaper publisher, Tribune Company, sued two of its ex-employees, as well as their current employer, New Times. Why? Because the employees in question, both entry- to mid-level advertising representatives, have agreements (that they don't remember signing) with Tribune that forbid their working for competing publications within a certain amount of time after leaving the company. An article in New Times Broward-Palm Beach calls the lawsuit an attempt to force the employees -- one a single mother, the other a divorced dad paying for his daughter's college education -- from their current positions.
The trouble started in 1998, when the Chicago Sun-Times broke ground on a new printing press on the south side of Chicago. The start-up process was a "nightmare," the publisher said. The press malfunctioned, causing the paper to hit the streets late and leading to mass subscription cancellations.
Requests for the Nov. 11 edition of The Stranger are pouring into the Seattle alt-weekly's offices, largely from readers who found a degree of post-election solace in the issue's unorthodox cover, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The cover features text in a series of colored bars that reads "Do not despair," before reassuring readers that they're part of a "diverse, dynamic, and progressive … urban archipelago" that voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. "People really responded to it," says editor Dan Savage, who wrote the cover text. Incoming requests for the issue number around 500, and that's just the beginning. "People want T-shirts, people want posters," says Savage.
Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month.
