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This just in from Gambit Weekly editor Michael Tisserand: "Gambit Weekly's classified section appears in a pivotal scene in the new movie The Skeleton Key. Early on, as Kate Hudson rides a streetcar, she peruses our employment ads and answers one that leads her to the swamp where all sorts of hyper-Hollywoodized hoodoo hijinks start to happen. By the way, Gambit A & E editor/film critic David Lee Simmons says it's no Angel Heart."

In this introspective piece published last week in the Los Angeles Times, former LA Weekly president and publisher Michael Sigman, who was hired in April to assume the same post at Creative Loafing, reveals why he left the job after only one week.

Ted Rall asks that question after attending the AAN Convention and finding "(m)eeting rooms at the Westin ... jammed with editors and publishers anxiously hatching plans to defend themselves from (Craig Newmark)". His conclusion? "The current standard formula for alternative weeklies -- youth-oriented pop culture plus local news features -- appears inadequate to meet the formidable challenge of vanishing classifieds." Rall (that's his illustration above) says alt-weeklies can survive by "banding together" to sell national ads, providing alternative coverage of national and international news, and charging a newsstand fee.