AAN Associate Member Featurewell.com celebrates its second birthday having built its reputation on solid relationships with both writers and some 900 publishers, Tech Central Station reports. The online mag says Featurewell.com's sales are about $200,000 a year, and CEO David Wallis projects they will hit $1 million by the syndicate's fifth year.
Originally Baltimore's alt-weekly was known as the City Squeeze and edited by "recent Johns Hopkins grad and inveterate pain-in-the-ass Russ Smith," Michael Anft writes. Anft takes a page from Smith's book and offers some biting suggestions for the Baltimore City Paper at the quarter-century mark, including spending more money on younger staff, instead of "aging hippies."
"If the vote was 5 to 1 against Nick, the discussion would pause for a respectful second and then proceed as though no vote was taken until we all came around to Nick's point of view or reached a new compromise." That's how decisions were made in the early days of the Austin Chronicle, according to Editor Louis Black, who says Founder and Publisher Nick Barbaro was almost always right, and more importantly, "had a vision of how this paper should relate to the community and how a business should conduct itself." Twenty years later things still "happen when they happen, get done when they get done, and every Thursday morning" newcomers are "both pleased and astonished to find the piles of issues stacked in the hallway."
Atlantic Monthly wannabe Joe Sullivan bought Metro Pulse and helped make founding publisher Rand Pearson's vision of an alternative weekly in Knoxville, Tenn. a reality. Although he's "acutely conscious of (the paper's) shortcomings" and the economy hasn't been much help lately, Sullivan thanks the people who have helped him make Metro Pulse into a paper that is contributing to its community.
Philadelphia City Paper celebrates its 20th anniversary this week with a big paper and a big party. In those two decades, the paper has had only two owners. Editor David Warner says one spent "15 years squeezing a nickel until the buffalo turned blue," and both preserved the integrity of the news against incursions from the advertising side.
