City Paper and Philadelphia radio station Y-Rock On XPN have each picked eight local bands to go head-to-head in the first "Philly Rock Shootout." The voting began this week, and the band that receives the most votes from each side will face off next week. The winner of that contest will be invited to play a showcase at this year's AAN Convention, to be held June 5-7 in Philly, as well as a Y-Rock festival. In addition, if City Paper wins, it gets to run the radio station for an hour; but if the alt-weekly loses, it will turn over a full page of its music section in an issue to Y-Rock.
In a Q&A with the Tales from the Reading Room blog, Mark Athitakis discusses the future of arts journalism, the changes afoot in the alt-weekly industry, and argues that print folks must embrace the web to survive. "I think journalists need to rethink what 'publishing' is and experiment more with video, audio, blogging, and social networking tools," he says. "You have to rethink it in part because the next generation of readers embrace all of those things, and it's folly to dig in your heels, stick with print, and say you're not interested in reaching those people, or say that everybody has to process your ideas on your terms."
"I Love You, I Hate You" is a City Paper message board filled with rants from people on everything from lust to jealousy to thievery. Allison Heishman has scoured the last three years' worth of postings and culled the best for tonight's dramatic reading at the Azuka Theatre Company's Valentines Party, Metro reports. Heishman, who is literary manager for the theatre company, says she expects a bigger crowd than at Azuka's other events due to the feature's popularity. "It's amazing how many people say, 'that's the first part of the City Paper I read every week'," she says.
City Paper art director Joe MacLeod narrates a short video shot during the paper's recent party at G-Spot, a local art gallery displaying large blow-ups of pages and covers published during the last three decades by Baltimore's finest alt-weekly. "Each page is sort of like a piece of artwork," says MacLeod, who laments the fact that the "archetypal alt-weekly-style feature ... it has that certain look ... it's all kinda going away because of digital. ... That kind of classic alt-weekly look is disappearing." Not that he cares, of course.
Duane Swierczynski will be leaving this year's AAN convention-host paper later this month to focus on his other life as an author of crime novels and other books, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. The City Paper has confirmed that senior editor Brian Howard will replace Swierczynski as the alt-weekly's editor-in-chief.
Duane Swierczynski's new interactive mystery is told from the perspective of Sherlock Holmes' trusty sidekick, Dr. Watson. The Crimes of Dr. Watson is sort of like an adult version of a pop-up book, as the clues in the book -- including replica newspapers -- fold out and are three-dimensional. Swierczynski, who in addition to editing the City Paper is a best-selling crime writer, says the book is targeted to both adults and children and can be a communal mystery-solving experience.
In her weekly "Murder Ink" column, Anna Ditkoff factually recounts Baltimore's homicides as they are made public by the police department and gives updates as they go through the legal system. This week, the Single Carrot Theatre compiled all the 2007 columns (282 murders) and did a straight reading of all of them, in order to give a comprehensive view of Baltimore's murder rate. City Paper managing editor Erin Sullivan tells AAN News that the reading was nearly three hours long, there were so many murders to cover.
"If you stop and think about it, it's hard to think of anyone who's broken out of that once-vital corner of the comics world in a dozen years," writes the Comics Reporter. Reacting to the news that Washington City Paper will stop using freelancer Robert Ullman to illustrate the Savage Love column, the Reporter wonders if the alt-weekly market for illustrators, cartoonists, and comic artists has "begun its final decline" as papers have to focus more on bottom-line pressures. "I think that's the way it's trending, definitely, but I'm not ready to pull a sheet over the corpse quite yet," Ullman says. "I don't know, I would think that with all the conglomeration that's going on with alt-weeklies these days, that there'd be more money for things like illustration, not less."
Due to a 2004 change in the association's bylaws, five papers that have taken on new majority owners in the past two years will have their AAN membership reviewed in 2008. The Membership Committee will evaluate The Other Paper, Boston's Weekly Dig, East Bay Express, Metro Pulse, and Cityview, and will issue a report to members a week before the 2007 annual convention. To retain their membership, each paper must be affirmed by at least one-third of the members voting at the annual meeting in Philadelphia, which is tentatively scheduled for June 7.
The Times columnist says that given all of the newspaper industry's woes, last week's Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper newsroom layoffs might not seem significant. But Carr, who was editor of the City Paper in the 1990s, thinks the cuts illustrate the larger issue of an industry-wide abandonment of investigative journalism. Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason says that's not the case. "We are not trying to make any other statement here other than it is a competitive world out there and we are doing what we can to make sure we are putting out an excellent paper in the communities we serve," he tells the Times.
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