The 35-year-old alt-weekly based in Victoria, British Columbia says its redesign debuting this week will "shak[e] off the dust to deliver a crisp, new design and updated content that better reflects its role as Victoria's alternative voice."
Tom Grant, who has edited the Augusta, Ga., alt-weekly since October 2005, will be leaving his post in late July. "The last four years have been an exciting time for Metro Spirit and we've accomplished a lot together," Grant says in a statement. "Metro Spirit is ready for a new voice and the paper and I have agreed that it's a good time for someone new to write the next chapter of Spirit's history." The paper is currently undertaking a nationwide search for a replacement.
Tom Grant was presented with the 2009 Louis Harris Award by the The Augusta West Rotary Club yesterday. The award honors the memory of Harris, a community leader and longtime editor of The Augusta Chronicle and Augusta Herald.
"Grant Pick had been writing for the Reader for about a quarter of a century when, at the age of 57, he died of a heart attack walking home from lunch. That was three years ago last week," writes Michael Miner in the Reader. "In many ways, Grant was the writer who best defined this paper. As he liked telling journalism students who read his pieces and asked where the news pegs were, 'There is no news peg. The people are the news.'" That anecdote is the basis for the title of a collection of his work organized by his son John Pick, The People Are The News: Grant Pick's Chicago Stories. The book "makes a great crash course in Chicago's subcultures and recent history, and its residents' heritage of tenacity," Time Out Chicago says.
Tom Grant, editor of the Local Planet Weekly, announces that he's leaving his job and running for mayor of Spokane, Wash. Grant has been a journalist for 23 years, primarily as an investigative television reporter. His reporting helped free more than a dozen innocent people from jail in the mid-1990s, and he recently helped uncover a secret deal in Spokane by which millions in taxpayer dollars were being diverted to the richest family in town. He has been with The Local Planet for two years.
Columbia Journalism Review delves into newsroom morale in its latest issue. Among the views presented are two from alternative newsweeklies. Former TV reporter Tom Grant is positively euphoric about his new job at The Local Planet Weekly . Meanwhile, over at East Bay Express, there's quite a different outlook.
