CONTACT:
Roxanne Cooper
rcooper (at) aan.org
202-289-8484
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WASHINGTON, DC — December 5, 2007 — Fifty alternative newsweeklies in the U.S. and Canada will publish stories this week to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol. The editorial package, conceived and shepherded by staff at Sacramento News & Review, includes a retrospective by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), a look-back by Kyoto participant Ed Smeloff, a drubbing of ABC News Correspondent and global-warming skeptic John Stossel, and a look at the controversial views of Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.
Many of the papers participating in the project are also contributing their own stories focusing on local climate-change issues. A list of the participating papers is included below. Links to Kyoto Protocol Anniversary stories may be found at kyoto.altweeklies.com.
Sacramento News & Review Editor-at-large Melinda Welsh saw the tenth anniversary of Kyoto as “a chance to reveal to millions of alt-weekly readers how little distance we’ve traveled these last 10 years toward a solution to this giant problem we’ve created for ourselves and future generations.”
The Kyoto Protocol Anniversary package marks the seventh editorial project commissioned by the trade association. Other notable AAN collaborative efforts include “Who Killed Brad Will?” — an examination of the Mexican government’s cover-up of the murder of journalist Brad Will; Jason Vest’s “Fables of the Reconstruction” — an analysis of a Coalition Provisional Authority official’s early detailing of the U.S. Government’s errors in Iraq; Jon Elliston’s prescient “Disaster in the Making: Homeland Security’s Impact on FEMA,” which foretold the problems at FEMA a year before Hurricane Katrina and Dan Frosch’s “Soldier’s Heart,” which predicted the explosion of mental-health issues emanating from the Iraq War, and highlighted the Department of Veterans Affairs’ inability to properly treat Iraq War veterans with serious psychological problems.
A list of alt-weeklies running all or part of the Kyoto package follows:
Arkansas Times
Artvoice (Buffalo, NY)
Athens News
Austin Chronicle
Birmingham Weekly
Boise Weekly
C-Ville Weekly (Charlottesville, Va.)
Chattanooga Pulse
Chico News & Review
Cincinnati CityBeat
Cleveland Free Times
City Newspaper (Rochester, NY)
City Pages (Wausau, Wis.)
Colorado Springs Independent
Columbia Free Times
Creative Loafing (Atlanta)
Creative Loafing (Charlotte)
Creative Loafing (Tampa)
East Bay Express (Berkeley, Calif.)
Eugene Weekly
Flagpole (Athens. Ga.)
Folio Weekly (Jacksonville, Fla.)
Gambit Weekly (New Orleans, La.)
Houston Press
Illinois Times (Springfield, Ill.)
Independent Weekly (Raleigh-Durham, NC)
Louisville Eccentric Observer
Metro Santa Cruz
Metroland (Albany, NY)
Monday Magazine (Victoria, BC)
Monterey County Weekly
North Coast Journal (Arcata, Calif.)
Nuvo (Indianapolis, Ind.)
Oklahoma Gazette
Omaha Reader
Pacific NW Inlander (Spokane, Wash.)
Pacific Sun (Marin Co., Calif.)
Philadelphia City Paper
Random Lengths News (Long Beach, Calif.)
Reno News & Review
Sacramento News & Review
San Antonio Current
San Diego CityBeat
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Seven Days (Burlington, Vt.)
Syracuse New Times
Tucson Weekly
Ventura County Reporter
Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Alberta)
Weekly Alibi (Albuquerque)
Westword (Denver)
Willamette Week (Portland, Ore.)
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As daily newspaper readership continues to deteriorate, as radio and television audiences become progressively more fragmented, as competition for the 18- to 39-year-old demographic soars in an already cluttered marketplace, alternative newsweeklies continue to engage young, active, educated and influential readers.
Since its founding in 1978, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies has grown to include 130 free-circulation weekly newspapers throughout North America. More than 25 million print and online readers in markets as diverse as Memphis and Montreal, Pittsburgh and Pasadena, Chicago and Charlotte, rely on their local alternative newspaper for news, political opinion and arts coverage they won’t find anywhere else.
For more information about AAN, go to www.aan.org.
