The alt-weekly is rolling out a program "designed to help exceptional businesses get off the ground in exchange for a share in the growth." Once a business is chosen, it will be officially paired with the Express as a marketing/community partner. The paper will subsidize the local marketing of the business in exchange for seeing a return when it grows.
In an email sent to some of the review website's most active users Thursday, Yelp solicited feedback about an upcoming feature that will let businesses post replies to user reviews, the Associated Press reports. As the East Bay Express reported earlier this year, many business owners complained that they were essentially being extorted by Yelp, whose sales representatives told them that the company could move or remove negative reviews only if they advertised.
You'll have to watch the video, which features Express staffers doing their best lip synching, to hear some new ideas on how to save print media.
Following up on its story last month in which business owners said that sales reps from the popular user-generated review site promised to move or remove negative reviews in return for advertising, the East Bay Express talks to six more business owners who allege similar practices. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman complained about the original article's use of anonymous sources (even though "Yelp is a review site based entirely on anonymous sources," as reporter Kathleen Richards notes) so this time the Express relied only on sources who were willing to go on the record. "Several said that the reps would offer to move negative reviews if they advertised; and in some cases positive reviews disappeared when they refused, or negative ones appeared," the Express reports. "In one case, a nightclub owner said Yelp offered positive reviews of his business in exchange for free drinks."
On Friday night, the alt-weekly teamed up with record store Amoeba Music, art collective Off Space and the de Young Museum to bring the pop artist's famed Manhattan art studio to the East Bay for a free party attended by "as many as 4,000 people." Rotating crews of 15-30 people spent more than a month transforming the recently vacated warehouse -- Express sales and marketing director Terry Furry himself spent two weeks building the red couch, and another week making a proto-disco coffee table from 1,800 tiny mirrors. "When I was in art school, Warhol was mainly frowned on for being commercial and marketing himself," Furry says. "But he kind of set the tone for what artists need to be to thrive. They need to market themselves as well as their art."
"Today the East Bay Express ran a lengthy story that accuses Yelp of manipulating review order for money," the user-generated review site's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman writes. "As we've said many-a-time we do not do this." He criticizes the story for relying heavily on anonymous sources and adds that the piece essentially overturns its "accusatory thrust" at the end.
The California Air Resources Board backed away last Friday from strict new regulations that would have put Berkeley startup 3 Prong Power out of business and dealt a severe blow to the nascent plug-in hybrid industry, the Express reports. 3 Prong president Daniel Sherwood credited an Express cover story published a little more than a week before the air resources board meeting with helping save the rapidly-growing industry. After the story came out, the board received more than 130 comments on the proposed strict new rules, the vast majority of which were opposed to them.
To help promote the Shop Local campaign that publisher Jody Colley is spearheading, the Express has made a public service announcement video featuring a number of local merchants. Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald notes that "there's an appropriately indie-folk soundtrack, though I'll confess I'm not hip enough to identify the uncredited singer."
Kara Platoni has won first place honors in the "small newspapers" category in this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Awards for stories in the Express about efforts of local scientists to determine whether there is life elsewhere in the cosmos. Platoni "did a marvelous job of bringing the faraway questions surrounding astrobiology down to Earth and particularly important to the readers in her region," judge Andrew Revkin of the New York Times says. She will receive $3,000 and a plaque at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in February.
