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Hundreds of people wandered into D.C.'s Pershing Park on the morning of Sept. 27 — activists looking for a protest, nurses in town for a conference, lawyers headed to work, and a cyclist training for a race. And there was District of Columbia Police Chief Charles Ramsey with his troops, ready to arrest them all. Washington City Paper's Jason Cherkis looks at the mass arrests during a peaceful protest and their aftermath. "As video footage and first-person accounts show, the park events constitute one of the most serious collective violations of civil rights in this city since the Vietnam War era," he writes.

Continue ReadingThe Incident at Pershing Park

Richard Riordan is preparing a prototype of a new weekly newspaper, The Los Angeles Examiner. The prototype, a 50-page tabloid, should be complete next week and "will be shopped around to prospective advertisers and investors," the Los Angeles Business Journal reports. Ken Layne, a member of the Examiner’s editorial staff and co-founder of the LAExaminer.com Web site, says the weekly would be a politically oriented, L.A.-centric paper aimed at affluent readers featuring commentary from well-known political writers and Hollywood insiders, but no sex ads. Former New Times Los Angeles writer Jill Stewart is a contributor to the prototype.

Continue ReadingFormer LA Mayor May Launch Weekly

Champaign, Ill.'s, alternative newsweekly, formerly called The Octopus, ceased publication earlier this month. Saga Communications, which bought the financially strapped paper from Yesse! Cmmunications in 2001, was never able to make it self-sustaining, The News-Gazette reports. Publisher Kristine Foate says she and General Manager Kathy Schuren will continue to work for Saga in its Illini Radio Group. The other five full-time staffers will lose their jobs unless a new buyer takes them on.

Continue ReadingCU Cityview Seeking a Buyer
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Saddam's crimes, al Qaeda massacres, Kurdish freedom, oil worth fighting for... and a few other things "potluck peaceniks" might want to think about when they gather to protest the imminent war with Iraq, courtesy of columnist Christopher Hitchens. "The government and people of these United States are now at war with the forces of reaction," Hitchens writes in The Stranger. Even when faced with the the genocidal record of Saddam Hussein's regime, "nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority that surrounds those who intone the 'peace movement.,'" he says.

Continue ReadingHitchens on the U.S. Role in the World

University of Chicago alumni Brian and Jan Hieggelke have agreed to print and distribute a campus paper, the Chicago Weekly News, with copies of Newcity included as an arts and culture supplement, Crain's Chicago Business reports. The arrangement boosts Newcity's circulation to 55,000, Co-Publisher Brian Hieggelke tells Crain's.

Continue ReadingNewcity Revives Campus Newspaper

Columnist Daniel Gray-Kontar and cohorts are aiming Urban Dialects, a new monthly magazine, at young city and inner-ring suburban dwellers. "There is always a new paper popping up. You don't get too excited about one or the other," Pete Kotz, editor of New Times' Cleveland Scene, tells The Plain Dealer. Village Voice Media closed Cleveland Free Times in October under an agreement with New Times to close its competing paper in Los Angeles.

Continue ReadingFormer Cleveland Free Times Staffers Launch Monthly
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Divers Alert Network is a Durham, N.C.-based nonprofit that's internationally respected for its mission of "divers helping divers." But a four-month investigation by The Independent's Jennifer Strom found that behind the $14 million-a-year enterprise, directors were accusing their longtime CEO and corporate counsel of also helping themselves.

Continue ReadingDivers Alert Executives Helping Themselves

Russ Smith tells Baltimore City Paper, which he co-founded in 1988, that he plans to return to the city and write full-time. Smith recently sold New York Press and tells City Paper he's tired of the "high-octane" Big Apple, where his TriBeCa apartment was uninhabitable for weeks after Sept. 11. "I'd like my boys to have a real backyard and house, Melissa [his wife] to have a garden, all that stuff. Also, I'm 47 now, and it's not like I go out to clubs at midnight anymore," Smith says.

Continue ReadingMugger Returning to Baltimore