"During my seven-plus-year tenure as a sex and love advice columnist, I've either experienced firsthand or read about dates so heinous, it's truly a wonder my vagina didn't seal itself shut," Judy McGuire writes in an excerpt of her new book, How Not to Date. The book, which collects many of the aforementioned "henious" dates, will be released Jan. 10 by Sasquatch Books.
Robert Schulman, who joined John Yarmuth and three other investors to launch the paper in 1990, died on Sunday. "He was kind of a conscience of local journalism," says Yarmuth, who is currently serving in Congress. In addition to his role with the Observer, Schulman worked at the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times and was "one of the first full-time media critics in the nation." He was 91 years old.
As we noted yesterday, Landmark Communications, which owns both Style Weekly and Port Folio Weekly, has hired investment bankers to explore the possibility of selling the company's holdings, which include more than 100 publications and other properties, including The Weather Channel. "Although I was disappointed to hear the Battens were exploring a sale, our readers will continue to get the best of in-depth, local reporting on news, arts and culture," Style editor Jason Roop says in a press release. Publisher Lori Collier Waran concurs, noting that readers, advertisers and other business partners can expect business as usual. "We just celebrated our 25th anniversary, and we're still going strong."
"Marya Summers is tired of hanging out in nightclubs, so she's quitting her job," South Florida Media Jobs reports. The New Times Broward-Palm Beach nightlife columnist is leaving to pursue an MFA in creative nonfiction. In this Q&A, she dispenses the notion that writing about nightlife is easy. "Most people are self-deceiving when it comes to who they are, so my column comes as a slap in the face," she says. "I've lost friends." Asked to give advice to the intrepid columnist who might want to replace her, Summers gets right to the point: "An expense account for a nightlife columnist is just incentive to drive drunk. Negotiate more pay instead of reimbursed expenses."
Annalee Newitz, who was culture editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 2000-2004 and whose Techsploitation column runs in many AAN papers, is now editing a new Gawker Media blog, Wired reports. i09, which tackles futurism and sci-fi, went live yesterday.
That's freelance writer Seth Hettena's take. "Week after week, I pick up the Reader hoping to find something worth reading over a cup of coffee only to fling aside moments later in disappointment," he writes on the Voice of San Diego website. He roundly criticizes the Reader for a variety of sins, saying editor and owner Jim Holman shows "contempt for his readers." He concludes: "The Reader is considered an alternative weekly, but it's not really much of an alternative to anything." However, not everyone agrees with Hettena's assessment, as the robust discussion unfolding in the story's comments section proves. "Thank God for the Reader and for the 164,000 members of its weekly audience who keep it alive and kicking the hell out of the bad guys in San Diego each week," says one commenter.
