The December issue contains a lengthy feature on the Louisville Eccentric Observer and its competitor for advertising dollars, Velocity. Velocity is a weekly arts & entertainment tabloid that was spun off from Gannett's local daily, the Courier-Journal. The paper's editor, Jim Lenehan, is confident his faux-alt will attract young readers: "We did a lot of focus groups that told us that this was what they really wanted to see -- that this was the kind of thing they would pick up week after week." (The article is not available on Louisville Magazine's Web site, but the publication kindly allowed us to post a PDF here.)
When he covered media for the Dallas Observer, Eric Celeste wanted to do more than deliver "bee stings" to the local daily. He wanted to delve into the paper's inner workings. His award-winning article, "At the Ripping Point," examined a newspaper consulting company's role in the decline of The Dallas Morning News. This is the 21st in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay probably rues the day that Andrew Wheat first laid hands on a spreadsheet. Wheat's research at the liberal think tank Texans for Public Justice informs the political columns he writes for The Texas Observer. His award-winning columns followed the money corporations donated to a political action committee to places it perhaps ought not to have been going. This is the 18th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
On Monday, Moyers' remarks from a Sept. 30 party for the Observer were made available on The Huffington Post. Moyers covers highlights from the Observer's 50-year history as well as his own experiences in Texas. He then moves on to problems with the current administration, saying, "not a day passes that I don't wish we could clone The Texas Observer, plant it smack dab in the center of the nation's capital, and loose the spirit of Thomas Paine."
The National Association of Black Journalists announced the winners of its Salute to Excellence Awards competition this weekend in Washington, D.C. The organization handed out six first-place prizes for newspapers with circulations of 150,000 or less, and every last one of them were awarded to New Times papers. Here's the complete list of NABJ award winners.
Utne magazine has announced the nominees for its 2004 Independent Press Awards, and Association of Alternative Newsweeklies member papers dominate the "Local/Regional Coverage" category. Austin Chronicle, Chicago Reader, The Stranger, The Texas Observer and Westword all received nominations, as did Los Angeles CityBeat, an upstart alt-weekly that's only been publishing for 16 months. Nominees were chosen from among 2,000 alternative media sources. According to the Utne Web site, selection depended partly upon which publications were "most apt to go missing from the Utne library."
Thanks to George W. Bush's capital gains tax cuts, John Yarmuth saved a lot of money when he sold Louisville Eccentric Observer last year -- money he's now using to defeat Bush. The founder and executive editor of LEO spent half that money contributing to the Kerry campaign, and now he's spending the other half to buy local TV time for a political ad that makes his case against the incumbent: "With record federal deficits and a war in Iraq, cutting taxes for fortunate people like me was the wrong priority," Yarmuth says in the ad.
