The folks at Willamette Week have agreed to sell the paper to Mark "Bingo" Barnes, and his wife Sally Gay Barnes, according to a report in today's Boise Weekly. Bingo, director of creative services for the Greenspun Media Group’s newspaper division (which includes the non-AAN alternative Las Vegas Weekly), is a familiar face to those who have attended the last few AAN conventions.
Philadelphia City Paper's Howard Altman lets The Inquirer's Tony Ridder have it right between the eyes. the daily is laying off editorial staff due to financial woes. Altman gives Ridder some advice on surviving a downturn –– ditch the focus groups, concentrate on the city not the 'burbs, bring the reporters back when times improve and don't abandon foreign reporting.
Philadelphia City Paper celebrates its 20th anniversary this week with a big paper and a big party. In those two decades, the paper has had only two owners. Editor David Warner says one spent "15 years squeezing a nickel until the buffalo turned blue," and both preserved the integrity of the news against incursions from the advertising side.
The Village Voice reports that a libel suit originally filed by anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson against Tampa, Fla.'s Weekly Planet, its editor, John Sugg, and former Associated Press reporter Richard Cole, has reached New York in an assault on that state's media shield law. Sugg wrote stories in 1998 and 1999 calling Emerson a fanatic who had, among other things, tried to link respectable Muslim scholars in Florida to the World Trade Center bombing. Emerson claims these and other media stories have damaged his credibility.
