Big Green Umbrella, a company owned by Michael Gartner and Gary Gerlach, has purchased Cityview, a Des Moines, Iowa, alt-weekly and AAN member paper, reports The Des Moines Register. Gartner also owns an interest in Pointblank, another Des Moines alt and AAN member. The two papers will merge and publish as Cityview, with Pointblank founder and editor Jon Gaskell as editor. With the last edition of Pointblank already on news racks, 10 Cityview staffers were laid off Wednesday and will interview for positions with the publication -- though not all of them will be (re)hired.
Steve Bailey of the Boston Globe looks at the impending battle between Boston Phoenix and Boston's Weekly Dig. He writes that "others have tried to take on [Phoenix publisher Stephen] Mindich and failed," and that the owners of Boston and Philadelphia magazines "have bought the five-year-old Weekly Dig with plans to pour in the resources and turn up the heat on the Phoenix." Bailey paints a picture of Old Guard vs. Youth Movement, of Champion vs. Challenger, before surmising, "More newspapers are better than fewer newspapers."
Owner, publisher and editor of the Sun since 1966, Steve McNamara addresses his sale of the paper to Embarcadero Publishing in this message to his readers. He writes, "Being editor and publisher of the Sun has been a dream job, way better than working the oars at the dailies in North Carolina, Miami and San Francisco where I started out." And he's leaving his legacy in good hands. About the paper's new owners, McNamara says, "In the newspaper business there are some real egomaniacs and general nut cases, but these guys are at the other end of the scale."
Two AAN newspapers serving different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area became part of the same organization today as the owner of the Palo Alto Weekly, Bill Johnson, purchased the Pacific Sun of Marin County. The sale coincides with the 70th birthday of Sun owner, publisher and editor Steve McNamara, who purchased the paper in 1966 and grew it into an award-winning newsweekly. McNamara said, "Once the decision [to sell the Sun] was made, it seemed natural to pass the responsibility to my old friend Bill Johnson and his associates at the Palo Alto Weekly." Said Johnson, "Steve and I have known each other and shared our challenges and ideas with each other for the last 25 years, and this seems like a natural outcome of that relationship."
The owner of the Atlanta Journal- Constitution no longer has a 25 percent stake in the chain of alternative weeklies. Tensions between Creative Loafing, Inc., and Cox executives erupted last year when the Journal-Constitution launched its own entertainment weekly, AccessAtlanta in the same market as Creative Loafing Atlanta, Caroline Wilbert reports in the the Journal-Constitution. Cox executive Charles "Buddy" Solomon told the Atlanta daily he agreed to the sale "to put all of this behind us."
It's an extra challenge to be alternative in a town where marijuana coffee shops and prostitutes posing in brothel windows are the norm. Todd Savage, a former Chicago Reader freelancer, didn't let that daunt him. He debuted his new English-language alt-weekly in the Netherlands' largest city this week. The Reader is a major investor in the enterprise.
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