Ida Ford comes to Cleveland Scene as classified advertising director from the Plain Dealer, where she directed inside and outside sales units for both real estate and recruitment advertising. Scene Publisher Ramon Larkin says her experience in these two vital areas, as well as her community and professional contacts, will be "a great contribution."

Continue ReadingCleveland Scene Names New Classified Ad Director

Two of the advertising industry's most respected forecasters predict ad sales will rebound in 2003. Robert J. Coen and John Perriss agree the improvement will accelerate in 2004 with a presidential election and the Olympic Games, Stuart Elliott reports in The New York Times. The two analysts made their forecasts at the opening session of the 30th annual UBS Warburg Media Week Conference in New York. To see a PDF file of Coen's report, click here.

Continue ReadingAd Forecasters See Brighter Future

In a case involving jurisdiction in Internet publication cases, an Australian court has ruled that Dow Jones cannot have a defamation case moved to the United States. Dow Jones had argued that the Barron's story in question was published in the United States and only downloaded in Australia. AAN has joined other news organizations in filing an amicus brief supporting Dow Jones' position, arguing such jurisdictional issues would have a chilling effect on Web publishing.

Continue ReadingAustralian Court Rules Against Dow Jones
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There isn't a college in the country that wouldn't mind having St. Louis schoolboy prodigy Kalen Grimes as its starting power forward in two years, Mike Seely writes in Riverfront Times. "But wooing prep hoop talent these days is a lot like courting a potential sweetie-pie. If you remember the orchid and box of chocolates on date one, you might flip skins by night's end. Show up all by your lonesome with only the merits of your program and a beat-up Ford Taurus, and you'll end up sharing a bed with the January issue of Hustler and a squeeze bottle of hand lotion," Seely says.

Continue ReadingFeeding the Hoop Beast

Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger and author of the syndicated sex column "Savage Love," goes home to Chicago, where Chicago Tribune arts critic Sid Smith catches up with him. "How did this North Side Catholic boy, the son of a Chicago homicide cop, become America's down-and-dirty (and gay) sex columnist -- and, now, defender of the Left?" Smith asks, and then provides some answers.

Continue ReadingDan Savage in His Old Stomping Grounds
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The Coast Guard and INS are being pumped up to fit into the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new bureaucracy, created by a bill Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., called a "hoax," the policing half of the INS "is bulking up like a football player in training, while the clerkish services division is shunted aside and told to make do with what it already has," writes Traci Rae Hukill of Monterey County Coast Weekly. "It's a case of enlargement of the enforcement gland. "

Continue ReadingHomeland Insecurity
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Why would a former San Francisco stockbroker travel to war-torn countries and refugee camps just to make people laugh? Clowns Without Borders takes Moshe Cohen to "zones of conflict" like Chiapas, where the laws of laughter are inverted, Bernice Yeung writes in SF Weekly. He tries to "bring a temporary lightness to places that have been shadowed by grief and hopelessness," she writes.

Continue ReadingClown Without Borders

As the alternative newsweekly industry matures, competition from dailies and other media for the desirable 18-to-34 reader intensifies, E&P's Lucia Moses reports in this week's cover story. Despite the burgeoning youth-oriented offerings from daily media empires, "it may not be all that dire for alt-weeklies," she concludes. "They are a long way from being confused with dailies. They still write with more opinion and attitude, and take more risks."

Continue ReadingAlternative Newsweeklies Sharpen Their Edges

An anti-trust lawyer tells NPR's Laura Sydell that the VVM-New Times deal looks like a clear anti-trust violation: "It was very public what they did, and my only feeling is they could not have had any anti-trust advice." The Bay Guardian's Tim Redmond decries the deal and compares it to the monopolization of local dailies, which, he argues, was the reason the alternative press "sprung up" in the first place. But AAN's Richard Karpel says there weren't enough ad dollars to sustain two large alternative weeklies in LA and Cleveland, and U. of Maryland j-school dean Thomas Kunkel says he was surprised by the investigation: "Anyone who is looking at the Justice Dept.'s attitude towards this sort of transaction in the near past might wonder what the fuss is about." After all, he notes, Justice didn't seem terribly disturbed as cities around the country became one-newspaper towns.

Continue ReadingNPR Reports on VVM-New Times Anti-Trust Investigation