Kevin Allman will take over as Gambit editor next week, replacing Clancy DuBos, who will remain on staff as political editor. DuBos co-owns the paper with his wife, publisher and CEO Margo DuBos, and is chairman of Gambit Communications Inc. "There are journalists in this country that would kill to be able to enterprise their own stories, work their own beats, and get the space they need to do their craft. They can do that at Gambit," Allman writes on his blog. "Now I get to join them, and I can't tell you how happy I am about that."
Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Jane Kim claims in a blog post that "one thing that was sorely lacking from the past two weeks of convention spotlighting was good alt weekly coverage." She then uses a couple of blog features from convention host-city papers Westword and City Pages to prove the "sad results" of "consolidation of the alt weeklies under VVM." In the comments section, Westword editor Patricia Calhoun argues that staff cartoonist Kenny Be, whose "Delegating Denver" series provided grist for Kim's critique, is "the town's best political columnist," adding that "to quote lines without the context of the artwork is hardly fair" when criticizing a cartoon. AAN executive director Richard Karpel, meanwhile, points out that both papers broke significant convention-related news prior to the conventions, and that several dozen other alt-weeklies had folks on the ground during the confabs. "It seems clear from the tone of this piece that Kim went in with a set of preconceived ideas -- the all-too-easy meme that corporate ownership leads to homogenization -- and wasn't going to let the facts get in her way at 4:42 p.m. on a Friday," City Pages' editor-in-chief Kevin Hoffman adds. Lastly, Village Voice Media executive associate editor Andy Van De Voorde takes Kim to task for "focusing on 'the various shades of Banana Republic grey' worn by the Palins" in her own work during the conventions, while City Pages reporters were arrested, roughed up, and pepper-sprayed as "a direct result of their decision to actually go out and cover news."
But Kevin Hoffman tells the Pioneer Press he wants the paper to be "more adventurous" and less partisan. "I'm probably a bit less ideological than my predecessor was," says Hoffman, who took over when Steve Perry resigned earlier this year. While City Pages co-founder Kris Henning decries "the corporatization" of the paper, staff writer Mike Mosedale says the major difference now is that Hoffman is more hands-on and runs a more disciplined newsroom than Perry.
The Village Voice Media paper announced yesterday that Cleveland Scene managing editor Kevin Hoffman would replace Steve Perry, who resigned earlier this week. Former City Pages co-owner Tom Bartel (the brother of the paper's current publisher, Mark Bartel) tells the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that he thinks Hoffman and present VVM management deserve a chance. "They've produced some terrific editors and stories over the years," Bartel says. "But anybody who comes in from out of town will have a certain learning curve. He needs to know the community he's covering."
This week, almost two dozen Association of Alternative Newsweeklies member papers published "Soldier's Heart," an article by freelance reporter Dan Frosch that casts a critical eye on the Department of Veterans Affairs' ability to properly treat Iraq War veterans with serious psychological problems. The article will appear in more than 40 AAN papers in coming weeks. Many of the participating weeklies will supplement the article -- AAN's latest collaborative story project -- with additional reporting to reflect the issue's regional and local impact. The collective stories can be found in a dedicated section of AltWeeklies.com.
Kevin McKinney, editor and publisher of Indianapolis's NUVO, subscribes to the tenets of reduce, reuse and recycle. Such thinking led to the alt-weekly's recent move to print on paper with nearly 80 percent recycled content. "We had gotten all our process worked out, so now we could look at more environmentally friendly options," says production manager Mike Fox (pictured). A box of factoids on NUVO's table of contents page lists the resources saved annually by printing on this paper, 6,256 trees and 442,777 gallons of water among them. And, says McKinney, "there's no noticeable difference in photos or art and no change in cost."
