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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gail Collins, editorial page editor of The New York Times; best-selling author and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean; NPR commentator Sarah Vowell; satirist Neal Pollack; and Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company, all share one thing -- stints at alternative newsweeklies early in their careers. These former alt-weekly staffers talk with AAN News about success in the big leagues and reflect on their roots and the state of the alt-weekly industry. And for good measure, musician-turned-alt-weekly-art-director Victor Krummenacher also shares his experiences with fame and the alternative newsweeklies that covered him.
Weekly Planet (Tampa) has laid off three editorial staffers -- News Editor Francis X. Gilpin and staff writers Trevor Aaronson and Rochelle Renford -- citing flat revenue and a desire to shift focus from political to cultural coverage, the St. Petersburgh Times reports. Neil Skene, senior vice president, group publisher, of the Planet's parent company, Creative Loafing, says the weekly will now use freelance writers for political coverage.
New York-based Avalon Equity Partners is now the majority owner of both the New York Press and Window Media, which operates a number of gay weeklies, including the New York Blade News and the Washington Blade. Cynthia Cotts of The Village Voice writes that the gay media worries about Avalon's ownership, fearing a private equity company with no gay credentials will undermine the integrity of their product. David W. Unger, co-founder and managing partner of Avalon, insists that neither the Press nor the gay publications will lose their identities simply by being connected through a mutual investor. Unger says the Press should make money "with just a little hands-on management."
After declaring his split with conservatives and the administration's war policy in Seattle Weekly, Philip Gold, an old-line right-wing intellectual, has resigned his post as a defense analyst at Seattle's conservative Discovery Institute, Seattle Times reports. Gold, who has also been on talk radio debating Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger, says, "Conservatives have lost their soul," but he can't join the "blame-America-first-crowd" either.
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