A recent survey of AAN papers revealed that the applications alt-weeklies are using to track circulation are as diverse as the newspapers themselves. A few papers rely on their in-house wiz for a custom-made program, but for the rest of the industry, a commercial package is the only sophisticated option. Alt-weekly circulation insiders describe their woes, successes, and dreams of better uses for the numbers.
"It’s not all that surprising that the Washingtonian is a really white magazine," writes the City Paper's Huan Hsu, scolding his employer in a sidebar to its 2,900-word demolition of the upscale city mag's lily-white staff and hypocrisy on diversity issues. "It would seem a much bigger problem for the City Paper, which purports to write about a predominately black city, yet is produced by a bunch of young white folks who live in Northwest D.C. Our urban cred is just as contrived as the Washingtonian’s class." (CP's Washingtonian story can be found here; scroll down for Hsu's sidebar.) "It wasn't always this way," according to Hsu, a Chinese-American who grew up in Utah and says he spent most of his "childhood aping the mannerisms of Mormons, not Chinese people." Former Editor in Chief David Carr established a minority fellowship that "wasn't just window dressing," he says, and the paper's "high-water mark (in edit-staff diversity) came in 2001, during Howard Witt’s tenure, when there were three black female editorial staffers and two black female interns." The paper's last minority fellow departed in 2001, and current Editor in Chief Erik Wemple accepts the blame: “It’s clearly my fault that we don’t have more minority representation on staff,” he tells Hsu.
Eight of the prospective members are previous applicants, and two are owned by alt-weekly veterans who had been members during a previous association with different papers. AAN members will also be asked this year to evaluate Boston's Weekly Dig and Des Moines' Cityview, the first two post-sale newspapers whose membership will be reviewed under a process established in 2004 when the association's bylaws were amended. The fate of all of these papers will be determined at the organization's next Annual Meeting, which will be held in Little Rock on Saturday, June 17, the last day of the 29th annual AAN convention.
In January, City Paper writer Gadi Dechter exposed several instances of plagiarism by Michael Olesker, a columnist at the Baltimore Sun, which he found through searches of the LexisNexis database. The Sun's editors followed up on the charges with a laborious manual search of the newspaper's archives. In a Feb. 15 column, Dechter explores the reasons why the Sun's editors chose not to use the plagiarism-detecting software CopyGuard and then puts it to the test, using Olesker's work as the guinea pig. The results: the software works fairly well, and even exposed one case where another journalist appeared to plagiarize Olesker.
In an extensive interview in Rochester, N.Y.'s City Newspaper, the NY Times' media reporter and incipient blogger doled out some advice for the industry that used to provide him with a paycheck. Alternative journalism is "lippy discourse plus culturally literate recommendations plus listings," he said. Problem is, the same "fundamental assets" are also available on the Web, where they're "far more searchable." So alt-weeklies need to do a "better job of putting their brand into digital realms," and they need to compete with the Web "to keep refreshing that sort of children's crusade of talented young reporters (that) make alternative newspapers vital." Carr isn't troubled by the New Times-VVM merger because he's "a fan of the New Times version of newspapering. They do very robust, city-oriented coverage that I think is a force for good, or at least accountability in the cities that they do them in."
John Saltas pokes fun at Warchol, a former Dallas Observer journalist, in his Jan. 19 Salt Lake City Weekly column, claiming that a recent photo of Warchol reveals the true age of the alt-weekly business. Writes Saltas, "I can't speak for my peers .. but if the face of AAN is the face of Glen -- who by the looks of things can no longer "Do the Hustle" -- we're toast. If Glen's old, I'm old, and all my friends are old. Alternative papers are old. At least, thank God, I have my hair."
This week's issue contains a defense of former Baltimore Sun columnist Michael Olesker by former Sun writer David Simon. Olesker was asked to retire earlier this month after City Paper's Gadi Dechter found that Olesker had lifted language from other writers at the Sun, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Simon argues that "most reporting -- unless it utilizes confidential sources or results from some investigative effort or special project -- has a short shelf life before it becomes nonproprietary," and says that if Olesker is a plagiarist, so are all journalists.
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