Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger and author of the syndicated sex advice column "Savage Love," paid $200 for advice icon Ann Landers' typewriter and $175 for her desk. "I want that desk and that typewriter," Savage told a Northwest Herald reporter at an auction of the late Eppie Lederer's belongings. "That's what I came for."

Continue ReadingSavage Buys Ann Landers’ Typewriter, Desk
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

The Center for Biological Diversity cares as much about the unarmored threespine stickleback as it does a cathedral forest of trees, which is why it is reinventing the environmental movement and could be saving Southern California in the process. LA Weekly's Susan Zakin follows the center's unlikely warriors on their daily rounds as they try to stop developers from turning one of Southern California's last natural rivers into a concrete-lined dump.

Continue ReadingSaving the Santa Clara River

Gail Thompson transformed the New Haven Advocate "from a scruffy low-budget weekly into a community powerhouse," Carole and Paul Bass write in a story announcing her departure after 11 years as publisher. "Under her stewardship, the paper nearly tripled its sales, broadened its readership, broke major investigative stories and helped spawn such community events as City-Wide Open Studios and Film Fest New Haven," they write.

Continue ReadingThompson Retiring as New Haven Advocate Publisher
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

Steve Fennessy received a notice that his license had been suspended for a DUI in Sarasota, Fla. He'd never been to Sarasota. This was the door that led the reporter into "a strange netherworld of law enforcement, where the normal rules of American jurisprudence are suspended." After about 100 hours of hassling with bureaucrats, Fennessy is no longer linked to a con with an arrest record miles long. "I was me again. Not him. "

Continue ReadingReporter’s Identity Stolen

"I don't want to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for money buried in a small-market weekly newspaper," explains CBW owner Dodge Morgan after closing the paper he bought in 1990. "The losses continue and the actuarial tables plod on," the 71-year-old Morgan tells the Portland Press Herald. According to Morgan, CBW's ad revenue dropped 20 percent after the Portland Phoenix arrived in 1999, and the paper continued to lose $5,000 a week even after he cut the editorial budget earlier this year. Staff writer Theresa Flaherty says that Morgan -- who lost over $2 million publishing CBW -- provided the paper's 14 employees with a "generous" severance package.

Continue ReadingCasco Bay Weekly Shuttered After 14 Years