India Blue (pictured), 48, was a staff photographer and music writer at the alt-weekly since 1995. According to the Hartford Courant, she was a single mother with two college-age sons who "was very active in prison outreach and regularly visited inmates in Niantic." Advocate Publisher Janet Reynolds says, "She was a great woman and a great employee."
In a fitting tribute, the paper dedicates the Best of New Orleans issue to its former ad director, who succumbed to cancer earlier this week. “Sue represented the best of Gambit,” says publisher Margo DuBos. “In a lifetime, you can only hope to know someone as wonderful as Sue.” News & Reviews’ Jeff von Kaenel, who worked with Crichton to organize AWN, says, “Putting it together was complicated because getting alternative newspaper publishers to work together is like herding cats. And Sue was one of the few people I met who could herd cats.”
Susan Crichton, former ad director for Gambit Weekly and a beloved member of this trade association, died of cancer early Thursday morning at the age of 44. "She left our world as she lived in it, calm and graceful," says her husband, Russ Martineau, who is left to care for the couple's 16-month-old son, Cooper. Crichton was a key figure behind the success of both Gambit and the Alternative Newsweekly Network, which she helped to found.
The Local Planet Weekly's Founding Editor and Co-Publisher, Connye Miller, died June 15 of complications related to the rare disease porphyria. Matt Spaur, her husband and co-publisher, remembers her in 475 words of poetry, pain and love.
Marnye Oppenheim, who wrote the "Bite Me" restaurant column for New Times Los Angeles for two years and continued it at Phoenix New Times, has died, the LA Times reports. She was 32.
Alan Baer's "love for the obscure and the nontraditional led him to the alternative news weekly," Omaha Reader writes of its eccentric owner, who died of cancer Nov. 5. The paper remembers Baer as "the philanthropist and the gentle man with a quirky sense of humor, who never lost faith in those around him and in the city he loved."
Knapp was hired as a lifestyle writer for the Boston Phoenix in 1988, and invented an alter ego, Alice K., who attracted a cult following in Boston. "As a writer Caroline had a signature style," the Phoenix writes in an article for Wednesday's paper. "Her grace sometimes masked the broad stretch of her range. As a reporter, she was dogged and inventive." Knapp was the author of two New York Times best-selling memoirs: "Drinking: A Love Story" and ''Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs.'' She died Monday of lung cancer. (Photo by Mark Morelli)
