Matt Taibbi's recent piece on Michele Bachmann is giving the City Pages (Twin Cities) staff a case of deja vu.
SF Weekly's Matt Smith and John Birdsall were honored by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Wine critic John Glas sent Minneapolis area restaurants a letter requesting "4 courses and 4 wines" at no charge in order to be considered for Best Wine Bar.
Content from the investigative reporting story generation panel at the Toronto Convention is now available in the AAN resource library.
The Independent has promoted Lynne Foland, who came to the paper in 2006 as general manager, to publisher. She succeeds Matt Gibson, who is stepping aside after 12 years to focus on his duties as company president and editor-in-chief of Montana Headwall magazine.
The Independent's senior editor Matt Kettmann is a co-founder of New Noise Santa Barbara, a music conference and festival that debuted Oct. 8-10 at venues throughout downtown Santa Barbara. "We're telling locals that it's like the wildly popular Santa Barbara International Film Fest, but with music," says Kettmann, the paper's former pop culture editor who more recently directed the editorial development of Independent.com. "And we're telling everyone else that it's like South By Southwest, but much smaller and on the coast." The Independent served as an official media sponsor and published the conference's program guide.
Matt Singer, formerly a staffer at the Ventura County Reporter, moved up the coast to Portland in October with hopes of landing another alt-weekly editorial gig. The Wall Street Journal reports that Singer's quest has been less-than-successful, and uses that anecdote as a springboard into a piece that details how cities like Portland are dealing with a continual influx of hipsters and fewer and fewer jobs. (A story BusinessInsider.com summarized as: "Hipsters In Portland Can't Get Jobs Writing For Alt-Weekly Newspapers.") Willamette Week gets a shout-out in the story as well, for its new "Restaurant Apocalypse" column, which keeps track of the city's myriad restaurant closings.
When asked about the future of his "Life in Hell" comic strip, which runs in a number of alt-weeklies but has been dropped by some recently, the Simpsons creator says alt-cartoonists are "at the bottom of the food chain," but that he remains hopeful about the industry. "It seems to me that if you have a publication with a strategy, with some enthusiasm, and some design sense, I think there is a way of keeping it alive," Groening tells The Onion's A.V. Club.
In May, Matt Gibson plans to launch and edit Montana Headwall, a quarterly lifestyle magazine focusing on the state's outdoor recreation scene. Initial plans call for a distribution of 10,000 copies. Most copies will be free of charge but the magazine will cost $4.95 at certain locations like supermarkets and bookstores.
The Simpsons creator and longtime alt-weekly cartoonist tells CNN that, after 22 years, "Life in Hell" is being dropped by its flagship paper. The cut is part of Village Voice Media's suspension of all syndicated cartoons. Groening hints he's thinking of discontinuing the cartoon. "I'm still in a bunch of other papers, so I may continue to do my strip," he says, "but it doesn't look good."
