Jody Colley left her position as advertising director at the San Francisco Bay Guardian to become publisher of the East Bay Express when the paper was sold by Village Voice Media to local investors in May 2007. Since then, the Express has been working on a variety of distribution-related changes: Introducing graffiti-painted art racks, fighting newspaper theft by hiring a private eye, and trying to distribute a higher percentage of papers indoors. Express president Hal Brody has even patented a system that prevents people from taking more than a few papers out of a news box at a time. Colley recently talked to AAN News about these and other developments. For more from Jody Colley, check out her Q&A with newspaper consultant Terry Garrett on his blog.
The Observer today announced that Bob Moser is the publication's new editor. He replaces Jake Bernstein, who left to become a reporter for ProPublica in June. Moser, who got his start as editor of North Carolina's Independent Weekly, has recently been writing and editing for The Nation, and is the author of the new book Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority. "There is no place in the country evolving more rapidly, or changing more fundamentally, than Texas," Moser says in a release. "The Observer will aim to deploy our tough, thorough, hard-nosed reporting to nudge the state in a progressive direction."
Fast Forward Weekly's Drew Anderson earned a first-place award in the best feature story by a local writer category at the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association's Awards of Excellence 2008. The story examined the practice of clearcut logging in Alberta and the controversy caused by logging in the Bragg Creek area of Kananaskis Country. "I was surprised by how complex the arguments for and against clear-cutting actually are," says Anderson. "The debate has become so politicized and so emotional, that the science is often excluded in popular discussions."
Longtime ad director Nancy E. Spittle is leaving the Weekly after seven years "to pursue new professional adventures," according to a press release. Her position will not be filled -- instead, the Weekly has hired two additional account executives. "Even though Boise Weekly still has positive revenue growth over last year, the economy requires all companies to tighten ship and work hard to increase revenue and improve performance in sales," the press release notes.
In the third installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Malcolm Gay, a regular freelancer for Riverfront Times, talks to Corina Knoll about his feature profile of author Qiu Xiaolong. Gay, who was formerly a Village Voice Media fellow at the East Bay Express and staff writer at the RFT, says he learned how challenging it is to write about a writer. "What they do physically and in terms of their day-to-day existence is very uneventful. So it's hard to bring drama and animation to those scenes," he says. "That's the challenge: to access that inner world and make it evident in the story."
In a piece for Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, Craig Cox weaves a review of David Carr's The Night of the Gun with personal anecdotes about Carr (a former editor for the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader, City Pages' crosstown rival) and the Twin Cities alt-weekly scene of the 1980s. "Once you were accepted into the club as a freelancer or -- dream of dreams -- a staffer at one of the two local alternative weeklies, you were plugged into the local pop culture scene in a way no one else was," Cox writes. "You didn't have to be high or narcissistic back then to feel good about working six days a week, every week (as we did at City Pages) for three or four hundred bucks. It was kind of an exclusive fraternity."
While investigating a string of rubbish fires started in trashcans near bus shelters this summer, Los Angeles Fire Department arson investigators caught a break when they found a witness who saw a man with a copy of the Weekly sticking out of his back pocket leaving the scene. Arson investigator John Little found the alleged arsonist strolling down the street, carrying a ripped out section of the Weekly in his back pocket. Little says he also found a "time delayed device" wrapped in burnt pieces of the paper in the trashcan. "It was a real CSI type thing," says Little. "We recovered newspaper out of the trash container and opened it up and saw a matchbook device. The section that was ripped out matched the papers in his back pocket ... He would set the newspaper down there and go across the street and watch." The 64-year-old suspect has been charged with arson. "And to think I believed copies of the newspaper flew off the racks because our readers couldn't get enough of our Calendar section," writes Christine Pelisek. "Guess again!"
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