John Dicker, staff writer for the Colorado Springs Independent, describes how he physically defended the First Amendment against the combined might of the Colorado Springs human resources department after a rookie staffer turned over a police detective unexpurgated file. "I did consider bowling her over, but this woman was big, more linebacker than power forward," Dicker writes for AAN News. "Call me an effete East Coast twit, but I just couldn't manage it."
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.
"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.
Sources tell the Los Angeles Times that federal investigators may be pursuing a legal solution that would actually re-open alternative newsweeklies in Los Angeles and Cleveland, the two cities where Village Voice Media and New Times agreed to close papers and eliminate competition. The federal anti-trust investigation is "unusually fast-paced," The Times' Tim Rutten reports. "Clearly, they've decided to move before the bodies get too cold," an anti-trust attorney tells Rutten.
Alternative newsweeklies have found myriad ways to team up with competitors for lucrative cross-promotional arrangements. Radio is perhaps the most common partner for alt-weeklies and music events the most frequent vehicle for cooperation, Ann Hinch writes for AAN News. Television and even print, however, have been mined by AAN members “to reach a broader audience and more diverse demographic.”
RedEye and Red Streak both "suck to similar degrees, and both emulate the clichés of youth-oriented marketing: brevity, snark, 'edginess' ... and color," Whet Moser of The Chicago Maroon writes. But their other, more important, failures include not being a substitute for the "brevity and depth" of the Internet or either a viable substitute for or a precursor to reading the regular daily, the University of Chicago columnist writes.
According to Harris Meyer, Jim DeFede is learning what it means to make the "transition from kicking powerful butts in the pages of the freewheeling (Miami) New Times to doing the same at the more sedate (Miami) Herald." Meyer reports that DeFede, speaking at a local SPJ meeting, said that when he wrote a tough column criticizing two local businessmen, the Herald was "flooded with angry responses" and "the paper essentially repudiated his column in an editorial the next day lavishing praise" on the targets of DeFede's ire. On the other hand, DeFede said, Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas now returns his calls.
Alan Baer's "love for the obscure and the nontraditional led him to the alternative news weekly," Omaha Reader writes of its eccentric owner, who died of cancer Nov. 5. The paper remembers Baer as "the philanthropist and the gentle man with a quirky sense of humor, who never lost faith in those around him and in the city he loved."
The Montreal police's organized-crime division urges local papers to reconsider running escort agency ads or face charges for solicitation, the Globe and Mail reports. In Canada, prostitution itself is not illegal, but solicitation for sex is. AAN member NOW Magazine in Toronto has been through this kind of crackdown before, the newspaper reports. In 1990, 14 counts of "communicating for the purpose of prostitution" were brought against it, but the Crown later dropped the case.
Chicago's new weekday tabloids RedEye and Red Streak are pulling the same display advertisers as AAN members Chicago Reader and Chicago Newcity, Jeremy Mullman reports in Crain's Chicago Business. "This will have some short-term impact on the Reader," newspaper consultant Scott Stawski tells Mullman. "I believe it'll put Newcity out."
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