"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."

Continue ReadingLA CityBEAT, ValleyBEAT Debut

"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).

Continue ReadingSpring Street: Online Personals for Hipsters

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.

Continue ReadingAngry Billionaire Pulls $120,000 in OC Weekly Ads

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."

Continue ReadingA View of Pittsburgh from the Other Side of Pennsylvania

The owners of the Long Island Press, one of the seven applying papers voted into the association at the Pittsburgh convention, "have begun plotting how to take the paper daily to compete with Newsday," reports the New York Post. Jed Morey, CEO of the paper's parent company, the Morey Organization, which also owns three radio stations on Long Island, tells the Post: "We consider the weekly a trial balloon. The size of this market lends itself to two dailies."

Continue ReadingNew AAN Member Already Thinking Daily

So says New Times Broward-Palm Beach's Bob Norman, who had hoped that his column last month outing South Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley (pictured in photo) "would do some good." But things "spiraled out of control," says Norman, after Foley said he wouldn't talk about his sexual orientation and denounced Norman's story and "rumors" about him as "revolting and unforgivable." According to Norman, the mainstream media coverage that followed reduced the debate "to a realpolitikal show, a grand distraction."

Continue ReadingMainstream Coverage of Outing Column “Shallow” and “Homophobic”

The national media "repeatedly scooped" The Plain Dealer on the New Times-Village Voice Media antitrust story that was brewing "in its own backyard," says Free Times' Michael Gill."I didn't have any trouble selling (the story) upper right on the front page of the business section on a Monday," the New York Times' David Carr tells Gill, "and that's tough space to get." Commenting on the government's role in the antitrust investigation that led to the story, Carr also says, "I wish they'd aim that gun at some bigger game."

Continue ReadingFree Times Says Local Daily Buried Antitrust Story