"We'll be excited if people just read it," Mark Oppenheimer says about the debut issue of The New Haven Review of Books. The publication's 300 copies are available only at a local bookstore, given away free with a purchase, but all of the contents are also available free online, Business New Haven reports. Oppenheimer leans on Connecticut alt-weekly colleagues in the inaugural issue: it features work by former Advocate scribe Paul Bass and Fairfield County Weekly editor Tom Gogola. "We have no funding, which is by design," Oppenheimer says, noting that he's currently looking for a sponsor to cover the printing costs of a next issue. "I wanted to do something that was very independent, very do-it-yourself."

Continue ReadingFormer New Haven Advocate Editor Launches Book Review

On the Dilbert blog, Scott Adams has been suggesting ways that Scott Meyer's comic "Basic Instructions" might be made ripe for daily-newspaper syndication, Seattle Weekly reports. The strip currently runs only in the Weekly and on Meyer's website. The readers of Adam's blog have been serving as the focus group as Meyer has tried the various tweaks proposed. "I'm keeping an open mind and giving a shot to anything he suggests," Meyer tells the Weekly.

Continue Reading‘Dilbert’ Creator Gives Seattle Weekly Cartoonist a Makeover

"Our early years were fun and full of possibility, but man, were they lean and mean," founding editor Stephanie Barna writes in an editor's note introducing the paper's anniversary issue. "We moved here in the middle of the summer from other cities, confident that we could figure out Charleston fast enough to put out an informed and relevant newspaper," she writes. "We relied on our previous experience in the alt-weekly world to establish a newspaper that reflected the city, not so much the people who put it together."

Continue ReadingCharleston City Paper Turns 10

Steve Perry, who left the paper earlier this year, tells the Minnesota Monitor that his new project is "a professional journalism site, but it's just as importantly conceived to be a community-and-conversations site." Though he won't reveal the site's name yet, it's set to launch in October or November. He says he's pulling inspiration from sites as diverse as The Stranger's, the Gothamist chain of city sites, and the Gawker Media sites. "I love the idea of building a forum that wantonly blurs the lines between 'professional' and 'amateur' voices wherever appropriate," Perry says. "After we started blogging extensively at City Pages, I was struck by how much I learned from the comments and correspondence it generated."

Continue ReadingFormer City Pages Editor to Launch ‘Web-only Local Publication’

Philadelphia City Paper editor and crime novelist Duane Swierczynski has teamed up with artist Jefte Paolo for "Moon Knight Annual" #1, which is set for release by Marvel this November. He tells Comic Book Resources that the book originated with fellow crime writer Ed Brubaker asking him if he ever wanted to get into writing comics. "That was like asking Lindsay Lohan, 'Hey would you ever want to get high and go driving?' Of course I wanted to write for comics," he says. "Consider me a silly happy bastard," Swierczynski writes on his blog. "It's not often a 25-year-old dream comes true."

Continue ReadingAlt-Weekly Editor Releases His First Marvel Comic