The New Island Ear will change from a biweekly music and lifestyle newspaper to a news and entertainment weekly, doubling its free circulation and aiming to reach older, 25- to 49-year-old, Long Islanders, Newsday reports. The Morey Organization, which purchased the Ear earlier this year, plans to launch the Long Island Press Jan. 16 in Nassau, Suffolk and Queens counties.
"Does the U.S. Department of Justice really have so little to do it must investigate why a couple of alternatives were folded?" E&P asks in a Nov. 25 editorial. With so many media outlets in both the Los Angeles and Cleveland markets where the two alternative weekly chains closed papers to end head-to-head competition, advertisers have plenty of places to go. "It's not an argument Justice can make with a straight face," E&P concludes.
Lael Morgan tells E&P's Lucia Moses that buyers have been calling since Casco Bay Weekly was shuttered two weeks ago. Morgan blames the economy and the Portland Phoenix for the weekly's closure. "We haven't had a national ad since they arrived," she tells E&P.
Casco Bay Weekly's co-founders, Monte Paulsen and Gary Santaniello, mourn the closure of the alternative newsweekly they opened in 1988. "It was glorious," Paulsen says of the early days in Portland, Maine, when the staff delivered the paper by themselves and the photographer worked in the staff bathroom. The paper closed Nov. 21, unable to stem financial losses and fight off competition from the Portland Phoenix.
"I don't want to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for money buried in a small-market weekly newspaper," explains CBW owner Dodge Morgan after closing the paper he bought in 1990. "The losses continue and the actuarial tables plod on," the 71-year-old Morgan tells the Portland Press Herald. According to Morgan, CBW's ad revenue dropped 20 percent after the Portland Phoenix arrived in 1999, and the paper continued to lose $5,000 a week even after he cut the editorial budget earlier this year. Staff writer Theresa Flaherty says that Morgan -- who lost over $2 million publishing CBW -- provided the paper's 14 employees with a "generous" severance package.
In a letter to the Los Angeles Times responding to a column written by media critic David Shaw, AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel says Shaw's characterization of the alternative newsweekly business "is both inaccurate and misleading." Countering Shaw's assertions, Karpel claims AAN papers "are as unfettered as they ever were and far more independent than their competitors in the mainstream press."
"New Times was a full-throated, outsized voice in a tremendously meek media town," longtime New Times LA columnist Jill Stewart writes in the LA Times. She says New Times is the only alt-weekly chain to "hit the news harder with each passing year" and charges other alties "have become increasingly soft and mired in out-of-touch 1970s-era liberal Democratic mantras."
Pete Kotz, editor of the surviving alt-weekly in Cleveland, admits it's "bad form to dance on the grave of another. " Honesty, however, "runs by a less civilized code," Kotz writes of the deal between New Times and Village Voice Media last week that shuttered VVM's Cleveland Free Times and New Times Los Angeles. "The Free Times' death wasn't unexpected or sudden. It was long, slow suicide," Kotz says. And he charges David Eden, the editor, with turning the paper into "a barking poodle with no house training."
