Diversity

Read more about the article Latino Coverage Is Crucial for Many Alt-Weeklies

According to the latest U.S. census, Latinos are now the country's largest minority group. With this in mind, the question of how alt-weeklies serve this important segment of the population becomes one of increased urgency. Marty Levine reports for AAN News on how papers from Miami, Fla., to Columbus, Ohio, to Orange County, Calif., are addressing the issue of Latino coverage in their area. It may surprise no one that, for each paper, the questions -- as well as the answers -- are unique to the community they serve.

Continue ReadingLatino Coverage Is Crucial for Many Alt-Weeklies

“I hadn’t done investigative reporting before and now I’m definitely interested in it,” Porochista Khakpour, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins master’s program in writing, tells Medill News. Khakpour and nine other students recently concluded the residential summer program at Medill’s Academy for Alternative Journalism, where they completed stories ranging from "what happens to the wrongfully convicted to tracking a female urban explorer to investigating a skydiving company with a high mortality rate."

Continue ReadingMinority Fellows Learn Narrative Journalism at AAJ

A "disturbing trend of alt-weeklies' [is their] inaccessibility in inner cities -- particularly in black inner city areas," Former Cleveland Free Times writer Daniel Gray-Kontar, now editor of Urban Dialect, writes in an e-mail to AAN News. "It's been a point of contention for myself and other black writers for many moons as we question exactly who we are really writing for." This week Urban Dialect publishes an essay by contributor Mark Reynolds about the distribution pattern of alt-weeklies as well as "the phenomenon of being an alternative weekly 'Designated Black Writer.'"

Continue ReadingAlternatives Not Diverse, Says Cleveland’s New Urban Monthly