The 2008 installment of Willamette Week's annual festival, held last Wednesday through Sunday, drew some 15,000 attendees to hear 218 bands at 47 shows, according to a WW press release. The only indoor festivals that remain larger are SxSW and CMJ. Performers this year included Built to Spill, Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Mogwai, M. Ward, Les Savy Fav, Battles and Ratatat. "Portland proved, for the third year in a row that people here come out to support great music," says MusicfestNW executive director Trevor Solomon.
Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Jane Kim claims in a blog post that "one thing that was sorely lacking from the past two weeks of convention spotlighting was good alt weekly coverage." She then uses a couple of blog features from convention host-city papers Westword and City Pages to prove the "sad results" of "consolidation of the alt weeklies under VVM." In the comments section, Westword editor Patricia Calhoun argues that staff cartoonist Kenny Be, whose "Delegating Denver" series provided grist for Kim's critique, is "the town's best political columnist," adding that "to quote lines without the context of the artwork is hardly fair" when criticizing a cartoon. AAN executive director Richard Karpel, meanwhile, points out that both papers broke significant convention-related news prior to the conventions, and that several dozen other alt-weeklies had folks on the ground during the confabs. "It seems clear from the tone of this piece that Kim went in with a set of preconceived ideas -- the all-too-easy meme that corporate ownership leads to homogenization -- and wasn't going to let the facts get in her way at 4:42 p.m. on a Friday," City Pages' editor-in-chief Kevin Hoffman adds. Lastly, Village Voice Media executive associate editor Andy Van De Voorde takes Kim to task for "focusing on 'the various shades of Banana Republic grey' worn by the Palins" in her own work during the conventions, while City Pages reporters were arrested, roughed up, and pepper-sprayed as "a direct result of their decision to actually go out and cover news."
OC Weekly staff writer and ¡Ask a Mexican! columnist Gustavo Arellano's second book is due to be released on Sept. 16. Orange County: A Personal History is a memoir that examines the history of Orange County as seen through four generations of his family moving back and forth between Mexico and Anaheim. Ed Zotti, longtime editor of the syndicated Straight Dope column, also has a new memoir, which was released this week. His The Barn House: Confessions of an Urban Rehabber is a "memoir about fixing up an old house in the city and pursuing the urban version of the American Dream." Check out an excerpt on the Chicago Reader's site. Another memoir on the horizon is Prince Joe Henry's Princoirs. Henry is the longtime author of the "Ask a Negro Leaguer" column in the Riverfront Times, and the book is an extension of the column. If you're not into memoirs, some of Seattle Weekly cartoonist Scott Meyer's "Basic Instructions" comic strips have been collected in the new Help Is on the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions, which was released this week.
Updating their reporting every few minutes by telephone last night, City Pages' Jeff Shaw and Andy Mannix say they were "assaulted by the cops" while trying to cover a RNC protest march. Here's the play-by-play, from Shaw: "The police said we needed to leave, we showed them our press credentials. I said I was a reporter and that it was a public street. An officer struck me and knocked me backwards over a curb. I tried to get up, and three or four officers shoved me to the ground. Andy was maced." Meanwhile, The Stranger's Brendan Kiley was pepper-sprayed earlier this week at the RNC. "I've hurt myself in a lot of different ways," he reports, "but nothing hurts like pepper spray. The pain is fleeting, but it is crippling." Lastly, Sam Stoker, who attended the AAN/Medill Academy for Alternative Journalism this summer, was arrested twice this week while covering RNC protests for In These Times. He's been tapped by LEO Weekly to write a first-person account, which he's agreed to make free to AAN members to reprint. For more on Stoker's piece, contact LEO's Stephen George at sgeorge (at) leoweekly.com.
After distributing this week's issue one day early, on Saturday, so readers fleeing Hurricane Gustav could grab a copy on their way out of town, about half of Gambit's staff are back in the office today, publisher Margo DuBos tells AAN News. The entire staff of 35 are expected back tomorrow. Much of New Orleans is still without power, but Gambit is running on a generator purchased after Katrina, furiously working on next week's issue, which will see the light of day on Monday, just one day after the paper's unusual Sunday street date. The alt-weekly also kept a steady pace of blogging over at the Blog of New Orleans before, during, and after the storm.
The Dig's media column this week tackles last week's "story" by WBZ-TV "reporting" that a nude illustration on the Dig's cover had sparked an outrage in Boston. "Look, we get it. The end of the summer is a rough time in the local news cycle," the column reads. "This is when news outlets bring out their own special brand of made-up news. We no longer start wars Hearst-style (we'd kill for that kind of budget), so you have to find something and say, 'This is an outrage/issue!' and go up to everyone within a small radius and say, 'Isn't this an outrage/issue?' and then quote the three people who agree."
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