Twenty years after Bev Johnson, Alex Zuniga, and Steve Moss (pictured) produced the first issue of San Luis Obispo New Times, the newspaper is celebrating not only its anniversary but also having new owners who are familiar faces at the office. Founding owner Moss died in 2005; Zuniga, the art director, and Bob Rucker, the longtime general manager, had to compete with others to purchase the paper. Their majority co-ownership became official on Aug. 2. "We have a lot of potential to keep getting better," Zuniga says. "We're not done yet. Steve developed the philosophy and feel of the paper that we want to maintain: If it's important, accurate, and relevant, it should be in the paper."
Geov Parrish, former staff writer for Seattle Weekly, and Sandeep Kaushik, ex-writer for the Stranger, last week participated in a "Podcasting Liberally" panel about "the fate of the post-purge Weekly in Seattle’s tech-savvy, blog-heavy media market." Parrish worked at the Weekly for eight years before resigning last week, and he doesn't pull punches when describing his differences with the new Village Voice Media management, especially his feeling that they "don't get" online content. Other panelists, however, argue that the Weekly is "oppressed by the weight of its own history" and the VVM changes may bring a younger audience to the paper. The panel also discusses Slog as guilty pleasure and Skip Berger's resemblance to Jerry Garcia. The complete podcast is available for download here.
As noted on Gawker, and confirmed by a call to the Miami New Times office, the Florida alt-weekly is sponsoring a contest to "win a free breast augmentation." The drawing is part of a promotion for a new branch of the Center for Cosmetic Surgery, a New Times advertiser.
Register for "Perestroika" before Sept. 12 to get the discounted rate. The conference, which is open only to AAN members, will be held Oct. 5 - 7 in San Francisco. Programming details are still being finalized, but topics that will be covered include Web-publishing essentials like revenue models, online advertising operations and technology, user-generated content, multimedia, search-engine optimization, and writing and editing for the Web.
In an article appearing in the Oct. 17, 1979 issue of the Wall Street Journal, David Blum exhibited an early fascination with the alt-weekly format. Blum, who was recently named editor of the Village Voice, wrote: "Some newspapers do a lot of strange things. Take the Chicago Reader." In addition to exploring the Reader's free-classifieds strategy and its strong hold on both readers and advertisers, Blum questioned the paper's lack of political coverage: "[Co-owner Robert] Roth dates the paper's first issue, that of October 1971, as 'five months after the Kent State Shootings' -- which would seem hardly the time for an alternative paper to concentrate on suggesting what to do on a Saturday night." Blum's article is available for $4.95 in the Wall Street Journal archives.
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