"You need this," claims the debut editorial as Southland Publishing launches two new alternative papers in the Los Angeles area after buying the assets of New Times L.A. "In recent years local readers have experienced their own pain when two local weeklies -- the Los Angeles Reader and the New Times L.A. -- were prematurely shuttered for no reason other than financial expediency," the editorial states. "They mattered, and then they were gone." For their part, the mantra of LA CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT is "to explore, to challenge, and to celebrate the substance and irreverence of our vast city."
The "electronic marketplace" syndication service will offer columns by Village Voice alums Andrew Sarris and Joe Conason, and others from the New York Observer, as well as news analysis from British-based New Internationalist after signing deals with the two publications.
"Self-revelation is often wrapped in sarcasm and the straightforward snapshot is a rarity," is how The Washington Post’s Libby Copeland describes the ads placed on Spring Street Networks, the online personals service used by Village Voice Media, New Times and many other publications that attract an urban demographic. The dating service for the age of irony, Copeland calls Spring Street, which claims about 950,000 users (compared with 8 million for Match.com).
With another fire season looming in the American West, Montana Governor Judy Martz hopes to get a jump on the flames by hosting the Western Governors' Association in Missoula, which is being billed as a Healthy Forest Summit. "The purpose of the Summit," the WGA has announced, "is to accelerate locally driven projects that will prevent catastrophic wildfires by reducing fuel loads and restoring lands." In other words, Missoula will this weekend play host to to an official pep rally of support for President George W. Bush's latest bout with resource policy doublespeak. To prepare, Missoula Independent devotes its entire issue to the theme of fire, including instructions for turning this week's newpaper into a flaming fire kite. Burn, baby, burn.
Donald Bren, a developer and GOP stalwart in Southern California, is on both Forbes' list of wealthiest Americans and OC Weekly's list of "scariest" Orange Countians. Despite OC Weekly's frequent exposes of Bren's “shenanigans,†his company was a regular advertiser until a few weeks ago, when it yanked ads worth about $120,000 a year. "Our crime? We’d forgotten to adhere to Bren’s prime directive: thou shalt not publicly discuss the actions of my wandering penis," R. Scott Moxley writes.
Howard Altman, editor of Philadelphia City Paper, takes off on Pittsburgh's new baseball park and that City Paper's luxury suite, the tensions between "New Timesers and Voiceniks" and the new owners of Cleveland Free Times, and what the association should look like in the future. "Working at an alternative, I know that the thrust of [Neal Pollack's awards luncheon] punch lines -- that we are verging on the old and irrelevant -- is something we should be keenly aware of."
A new Pew Report adds to a mounting pile of evidence that the oceans are dying. Andrew Scutro looks at the report and talks to experts about how quickly and how catastrophically humans can damage ocean life, from pollution to overfishing. "It's going to be a war," Dr. Jeremy Jackson, director of the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, tells Scutro. "We always do these things, but if we do them late the consequences could be vastly worse than if we'd done them on time."
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