San Jose-based Metro Newspapers publishes Good Times Santa Cruz, Metro Silicon Valley, and North Bay Bohemian.
Santa Cruz Weekly will be merged with Good Times. The deal also includes three daily newspapers.
The Independent Weekly (Durham, N.C.) and its associated website, indyweek.com, are being sold to Richard Meeker and Mark Zusman. Meeker and Zusman are the owners of City of Roses Newspaper Company which publishes Willamette Week and the Santa Fe Reporter.
Pulcrano, the CEO and executive editor of Metro Newspapers Group, has signed an agreement to purchase the Los Gatos Observer. The site will be run by the division of Metro known as Boulevards.
Metro and Boulevards are joining forces with a Bay Area NBC affiliate, two leading local citizen journalism sites, and the news aggregator Topix to create "a wide-ranging community-based news initiative ... that will span print, web, citizen journalism and broadcasting." Stories from Metro will be available for the broadcast partners to use, and stories from the citizen journalism sites and the TV network will be excerpted in a new section called "Mashup!" in Metro's print edition. "We are concerned about the consolidation, layoffs and disinvestment in local publishing and want to make sure that communities here are well covered," Dan Pulcrano, executive editor of Metro and CEO of Boulevards, says in a statement. "We will be expanding our news coverage and adding resources."
The Metro Newspapers CEO is "one of the few publishers that have successfully navigated the treacherous straights between print media and the new world online," the trade magazine Domain Name Journal says in a cover profile. The story concentrates on Pulcrano's creation of Boulevards New Media and his acquisition of a "near priceless portfolio that includes 20 of the 30 largest American city names in the .com extension." But Pulcrano also talks about how he got into journalism and ended up creating Metro Newspapers in the first place. He started publishing underground papers at age 11, later reported for the San Diego Reader, and then was approached by Jay Levin to help launch the L.A. Weekly when he was 19 years old. "Working there was life changing for me too; from that point on I knew what I wanted to do," he says of his stint at the Weekly.
In January, Metro Silicon Valley and North Bay Bohemian reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard C. Blum was a major beneficiary of contracts from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) that she chaired. Last month, Feinstein quietly left the subcommittee after six years of service. "Perhaps she resigned from MILCON because she could not take the heat generated by Metro's expose of her ethics," reporter Peter Byrne speculates. "Or was her work on the subcommittee finished because Blum divested ownership of his military construction and advanced weapons manufacturing firms in late 2005?" Whatever the explanation, Feinstein's resignation caused a stir amongst a number of right-wing pundits, who claim liberal media bias is keeping the story out of the mainstream media. UPDATE: Peter Byrne informs AAN that it's not just the right that's up in arms about Feinstein's conflicts: Members of Code Pink and the Raging Grannies protested outside her San Francisco home this weekend. "It is an investigative journalist's dream to watch a story mobilize people across the political spectrum -- from Rush Limbaugh's Dittoheads to the Raging Grannies and Code Pink," Byrne tells AAN News. "And having reactionary demogogues pump up a story whose research was funded in part by The Nation Institute has a delicious irony."
Metro Silicon Valley and North Bay Bohemian report this week that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband was a major beneficiary of military appropriations blessed by a subcommittee that she headed, parent company Metro Newspapers announced today in a press release. Feinstein (D-Calif.) approved billions of dollars in military construction expenditures awarded to two firms that were controlled by an investment group headed by the senator’s spouse, financier Richard C. Blum, according to the investigative story by Metro's Peter Byrne. The story "examines the many ways in which Sen. Feinstein committed repeated breaches of ethics as (the subcommittee) chairwoman or ranking member from 2001-2005," according to the release.
