The new owner of the Knoxville, Tenn., alternative newsweekly has replaced two staff members after telling AAN News in May that he had no plans for staff changes. Brian Conley, a developer, has named an employee of his real estate firm managing editor and replaced the paper's art director with an award- winning advertising designer, who will direct a redesign.
The Detroit Free Press looks at the brawl between AAN-member Metro Times and upstart Real Detroit Weekly. In this corner, Metro Times -- 20 years old and sophisticated, laden with narrative journalism, investigative stories, in-depth arts and music criticism, a paper for "people who read without moving their lips," Editor Jeremy Voas tells the daily. In the other, the challenger Real Detroit -- "all style and flash and talking trash," and unabashedly giving advertisers favorable coverage. Readers -- and advertisers -- will determine the winner, but Real Detroit has carved out a niche that's giving it about half the readership of the dominant Times, freelancer Christopher Walton reports.
Joe Sullivan, publisher of Metro Pulse for 10 years, has sold the Knoxville, Tenn., weekly to Brian Conley, a general contractor who has development contracts with the city. Conley, who was briefly a co-owner of the Pulse in the mid-1990s, pledges he will guard the alt-weekly's editorial independence, even as it investigates his own dealings with the city (see story link below). Sullivan stays on as editor in chief and columnist.
Alternative newsweeklies have found myriad ways to team up with competitors for lucrative cross-promotional arrangements. Radio is perhaps the most common partner for alt-weeklies and music events the most frequent vehicle for cooperation, Ann Hinch writes for AAN News. Television and even print, however, have been mined by AAN members “to reach a broader audience and more diverse demographic.”
"There were tears, but no pink slips," Publisher Dan Pulcrano says of the closing of Metro Publishing Co.'s Oakland, Calif.-based Urbanview this week. Some of the staff will shift focus to Metro's Boulevard New Media, a network of 22 e-commerce sites for major cities across the United States. That business has grown rapidly this past year, Pulcrano says.
Dan Pulcrano, publisher of Metro Silicon Valley, says he's never "seen someone so blatantly try and enter a market by expropriating a trademark and associating it with a knockoff product as we have seen with the current 'SurfMetro/The Wave' folks." Federal Judge Claudia Wilken has issued a preliminary injunction against SurfMet Inc. barring them from using the Metro name on their publication and Web site. Wilken told SurfMet that she may allow them to use the mark "if you want to use it to sell toothbrushes in Des Moines—maybe."
