In its annual list of 10 newspapers that "do it right," E&P has singled out the San Francisco Bay Guardian as "the archetype of the politically involved, locally focused alternative newspaper that's an alert and occasionally rabid watchdog." Editor/publisher Bruce Brugmann tells E&P that he worries that he and his wife and Bay Guardian co-founder Jean Dibble "are almost anachronisms" in today's media environment, with their brand of crusading alt-journalism. "Every good newspaper man ought to be controversial," Brugmann says.
Richard Hart resigned last week, the News & Observer reports. The editor of the 50,000-circulation Durham, North Carolina, weekly tells the N&O that he chose to resign. "It's a tough job, and I was ready to move on," he says. "I'm very proud of the work of the staff and the awards the paper received during my time there."
Writing for the defendant newspaper and its parent company, Village Voice Media, Will Harper reports that the Weekly said it sold ads below cost for "pro-competitive" reasons like generating new sales and "increas(ing) the customer base in a severely depressed market." VVM's motion, which was filed last week in response to the Bay Guardian's Oct. 2004 lawsuit, also asserted that the newspaper chain never engaged in a conspiracy to put its Bay Area competitor out of business. And in a unique counter-argument, the Weekly claimed that by filing suit, the Bay Guardian is trying to force it to reduce editorial expenses in order to adhere to a business model that relies heavily on freelancers and unpaid interns, instead of full-time reporters. THE BAY GUARDIAN'S REPORT: Judge advises attorneys to prepare for October trial even as summary-judgment motion is filed.
The alt-weekly put out a call for local musicians to create 30-second jingles, and plenty responded. There are now 26 jingles in the running for the possibility of being featured in local radio ads for the Weekly. Readers are currently listening to and voting on the best jingles online, and the winner of the reader's poll will also receive a $500 prize. "We will probably cut the [radio] spot with an all-star band in different genres," says Bill Shreve, the Weekly's director of Marketing and Advertising. He adds: "We've gotten a pretty good buzz off this thing."
"The biggest problem I have with the framing is that it's a supply-side question, which means there's hardly a wrong answer to it," says newspaper consultant Terry Garrett. The alt-weekly veteran discussed "Making Decisions in a Complex and Changing Media Market" at this year's AAN convention, and has begun a series of blog posts on the state of the alt-weekly industry as he sees it. "The implication in the subtle difference between the two choices is that you may be spending too much time on non-core business function and too little on your newspapers," he says. "The two ways to prove that is to ask demand-side questions first and to accurately measure your performance in operations against the best success standards." He lays out four key "demand-side" questions for newspapers:
- What information do consumers want?
- What does that information accomplish for them?
- How do they get it?
- Are their preferences for what they want and how they get it changing, and if so in what ways?
Fishbowl LA says that Jon Wiener's piece on LA Weekly and Village Voice Media is, among other things, a "cry from an old media guy in a new media world." Regarding Wiener's criticism of the paper's slight reporting on the May Day fiasco in MacArthur Park, which was his evidence of the paper's "big editorial shift to the right," Fishbowl LA points him to the internet, where the Weekly published nearly 4,000 words on the subject on top of the "330-word piece" Wiener cited. Longtime film reviewer (and current OC Weekly staffer) Luke Y. Thompson also tells Fishbowl that "the film reviews haven't been assigned out of Denver for as long as I've been a part of it," as former OC Weekly editor Will Swaim had told Wiener. Meanwhile, New Times Broward-Palm Beach columnist Bob Norman, in a letter to Romenesko, says the story "is exactly the kind of thing Village Voice Media is moving the alt-weekly world away from -- presumptuous ideological essays with much teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing but very little actual reporting or common sense."
The oldest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests still pending in the federal government were first filed two decades ago, according to the Knight Open Government Survey (pdf file) released today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The Department of State reported ten pending requests older than 15 years; other agencies with the oldest requests include the Air Force and two components of the Justice Department, the Criminal Division and the FBI. The survey also found that ten agencies have misrepresented their FOIA backlogs to Congress. One example: the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy -- which is leading the opposition to FOIA reform legislation -- told Congress that its oldest request was from 2003, when unresolved requests actually date back to 2001.
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