Watson talks with WUNC-FM's Frank Stasio about her long tenure at the North Carolina alt-weekly and the current state of the business. "We were in existence for about 16 years before we made a profit," she says of the Indy, which was launched in 1983. Now, though, Watson says that the paper is financially healthy, all things considered. "When you can compare notes with [other alt-weeklies], we're doing pretty well," she says. She attributes the Indy's resilience in part to the local economy's relative health and also to the leanness of the organization. With only about 30 staffers, she says the paper "can kind of turn on a dime when we see we need to tighten our belt."
Miami New Times' Francisco Alvarado, the Houston Press' Margaret Downing and The Village Voice's Elizabeth Green were all honored in the 2008 National Awards for Education Reporting. The competition, sponsored by the Education Writers Association, "honors the best education reporting in the print and broadcast media."
The Globe's thesis is that "falling advertising revenue" is forcing weekly papers to "scale back dramatically." But Phoenix Media/Communications Group president Bradley Mindich says his publications don't fit that mold. "We are not cutting back," he tells reporter Johnny Diaz, who nevertheless intimates that the Boston Phoenix is using less color and sharing film reviews with its newly-acquired Spanish-language weekly to save money. "We actually have more color now" and cutting expenses is not the primary reason his papers are sharing content, Mindich tells AAN News. Weekly Dig publisher Jeff Lawrence says the story was mostly accurate but that it suffered from faulty framing: "Our business model is intentionally evolving -- not reacting to the economy," he tells AAN News.
Starting in April, the six-paper chain will cut executive compensation by five to 15 percent, Washington City Paper's Erik Wemple reports. On a conference call today, COO Kirk MacDonald said that he and CEO Ben Eason will take the 15 percent cut and that others -- including publishers, sales executives, and top editors -- will get more moderate slices. Wemple is glad he didn't have to implement another round of layoffs. "This approach makes way more sense," he writes. "No depressing discussions with the staff today!" MORE: The Chicago Reader and Creative Loafing (Tampa) weigh in.
Alan Mutter says newspapers shouldn't charge for access to their websites unless they provide content that is "unique and valuable." As an example, he says the pay wall erected by the daily Santa Barbara News-Press has left the paper with less than half of the traffic generated by the much smaller Independent. When wildfires threatened Santa Barbara in November, Mutter says, "scant information" was available for non-subscribers on the daily's site, while the alt-weekly's site -- which won a 2008 EPpy Award for best weekly newspaper-affiliated website -- "brimmed with up-to-the-minute bulletins, first-person reports" and fire photos.
Starting tomorrow, the paper will have a show every Thursday on WSRQ-AM. Editors will take to the air to talk about what's in the current issue of the paper and preview upcoming events and stories.
Two freelancers "affiliated" with AAN members are among the 23 journalists selected to participate in the fifth National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. LEO Weekly's Rebecca Haithcoat and Washington City Paper's Glen Weldon will participate in the 10-day program this August.
At an event in Santa Barbara last week, the host of the Travel Channel program No Reservations touched on his early brush with journalism in New York City. Bourdain said that the first piece he ever sold was to the New York Press, but it was never published. "Week after week after week I kept getting bumped," he said. "And in some moment of drunken hubris I called up [the Press] and was like, 'Fuck you man! I'm pulling the article. I'm going to the New Yorker.'" The New Yorker ran the piece, and as the Santa Barbara Independent puts it, "from there, it was a quick hop to best seller list status and worldwide fame."
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