City Paper art director Joe MacLeod narrates a short video shot during the paper's recent party at G-Spot, a local art gallery displaying large blow-ups of pages and covers published during the last three decades by Baltimore's finest alt-weekly. "Each page is sort of like a piece of artwork," says MacLeod, who laments the fact that the "archetypal alt-weekly-style feature ... it has that certain look ... it's all kinda going away because of digital. ... That kind of classic alt-weekly look is disappearing." Not that he cares, of course.
In her weekly "Murder Ink" column, Anna Ditkoff factually recounts Baltimore's homicides as they are made public by the police department and gives updates as they go through the legal system. This week, the Single Carrot Theatre compiled all the 2007 columns (282 murders) and did a straight reading of all of them, in order to give a comprehensive view of Baltimore's murder rate. City Paper managing editor Erin Sullivan tells AAN News that the reading was nearly three hours long, there were so many murders to cover.
Last year, the creator of the comic strip "Lulu Eightball" did a comics feature for Baltimore City Paper about her her love/hate relationship with cigarettes, which is now been adapted into book form. These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves: A Love/Hate/Love/Hate/Love Letter to a Very Bad Habit was released by Bloomsbury this month. In a conversation with Philadelphia City Paper, Flake says she's once again a smoker, and that it took her "a great many cigarettes" to write the book. She also offers sage advice to anyone trying to get someone else to quit smoking: "Refuse to kiss them on the mouth. While you're fucking them."
In 1977, Johns Hopkins University graduates Russ Smith (who later founded New York Press) and Alan Hirsch launched the first issue of City Squeeze. "Despite the dreadful name (soon changed to its current handle) and shoestring origins, it quickly established itself as the house organ of Baltimore's demimonde as well as a feisty elbow-thrower in the local media scrum," says current editor Lee Gardner in this week’s cover intro. The issue features several stories from the archives, including a 1979 examination of Charm City's political bosses by Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden, a 1984 interview with child molester Arthur Goode by Hairspray filmmaker John Waters, and a selection of photography by long-time contributor Jennifer Bishop. Online readers can also check out the first year of City Squeeze issues in a PDF gallery. "As for the future of City Paper, well, there’s another issue to get out next week, and another the week after that, and I believe that the paper offers something distinctive enough that the demand for it will endure for weeks and weeks and weeks to come," writes Gardner.
Started as City Squeeze by Russ Smith and Alan Hirsch in 1977, the alt-weekly has "evolved from monthly to bi-weekly to weekly, switched back and forth between free distribution and paid distribution before finally settling on free distribution as it is today," according to a press release. A special 30th anniversary issue will hit the streets of Baltimore Aug. 1.
The Maryland Army National Guard's recruitment chief was stripped of his command and about a dozen other recruiters were punished after an internal investigation revealed misuse of government money, fraudulent enlistments and improper relationships among Guard members, the Washington Post reports. The probe was sparked by recent stories in Baltimore City Paper that "alleged deceptive recruiting practices aimed at meeting quotas," according to the Post.
Peripatetic reporter Lacey Phillabaum blazed a trail through the alternative press even after sending the University of Washington's Institute for Urban Horticulture up in blazes on behalf of the eco-terrorist group Earth Liberation Front in 2001. Besides working as a staffer at The Source Weekly and C-Ville Weekly, Phillabaum contributed freelance pieces to sundry alternative newspapers and AAN. "I knew she was very interested in environmental stories from the clips she had," Washington City Paper Senior Editor Mike Debonis tells Baltimore City Paper, "But I didn't have an inkling that she had any radical tendencies."
"When we learned our favorite media muckraker, City Paper reporter ... Gadi Dechter, was taking a new job at The Sun, we were shocked. Shocked!" writes Baltimore magazine's Geoff Brown. The July announcement was surprising because Dechter had repeatedly criticized the daily, most notably exposing instances of plagiarism by columnist Michael Olesker. Dechter says he "was never bored at City Paper," and calls it "the best job I ever had." Van Smith, the City Paper's political reporter, wishes that the alt-weekly had been able to keep Dechter on board: "It would be good for Baltimore storytelling to have Gadi at City Paper," he says.
At a recent American Press Institute seminar on "MediaPreneurship," Don Farley, publisher of Baltimore City Paper, and Brad Moore, general manager of the commuter daily RedEye, shared their insights on creating a successful "alternative" print product. (A summary is posted on API's Web site.) Among other things, Farley suggests that it is more important to hire passionate employees than experienced employees, and that change should be viewed as opportunity. Most tellingly, Farley says that "if you have to try to be edgy, you're not edgy"; meanwhile, Moore recounts how prior to the launch of RedEye, staffers identified words they "wanted people to identify with [the] new product, including 'savvy,' 'edgy,' and 'engaged.'"
