For years, editors of AAN papers talked about having a Web site they could use to buy articles from each other in a pinch. This year DesertNet built them the site, AltWeeklies.com. Over the summer, editors filled the story-sharing site with news articles, commentary and reviews. And now AAN's director of sales and marketing, Roxanne Cooper, is promoting AltWeeklies.com to the public with the hope of building a broader online audience for all AAN papers.
In an opinion piece published in Boulder Weekly, AAN executive director Richard Karpel recounts a phone interview he gave to The Daily Camera. The Boulder, Colo., daily is launching Dirt, a free weekday paper targeting 18- to 24-year-olds, and its reporter wanted a comment. Karpel obliged, explaining why Dirt, like any number of similar tabloids, would ultimately fail to reach young people: Daily papers tiptoe around potentially offensive language and subject matter; they're too "objective" for passion or point of view; and they're institutions far removed from the world most young people inhabit. The Camera chose to publish his one comment that tended to make the opposite point, so he lays out his full argument here.
AAN launched a new Web site this week providing links and summaries to some of the most interesting stories in its 122 member papers. AltWeeklies.com debuted on Wednesday with a collection of 100 stories on the economy, politics and social issues, as well as movies, music, books and other arts and entertainment. The site's primary goal is to allow AAN editors to exchange articles and ideas. But it's also a place where readers will discover many more of the same type of intriguing and provoking stories they've found featured in AAN.org's This Week in Alternative Weeklies section.
In mid-April, editors of AAN papers waited in suspense to see a promised story discussing a memo by a U.S. official detailed to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Minutes before 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 20, the investigative piece by reporter Jason Vest was posted to the Web sites of two papers, The Village Voice and The Boston Phoenix. Over the following hours and days, AAN papers from New Haven, Conn., to Mill Valley, Calif., also published the story, in print, on the Web, or both. Alerted to the article by blogs, readers rushed to alt-weeklies' Web sites in droves.
Writing in "The Reliable Source," Richard Leiby (pictured) presents evidence to support the theory that Michael Rubin wrote the memo that was the subject of Jason Vest's story for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies last week. Leiby describes Rubin as "a thirty-something neocon intellectual" who served as a Coalition Provisional Authority political officer in Iraq for nine months. He is now a scholar at the "hawkish American Enterprise Institute." Rubin wouldn't confirm or deny that he wrote the memo.
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