Southland Publishing's David Comden announces that his company successfully bid for the New Times LA assets that were put up for sale in the wake of the consent decree signed by New Times after a Department. of Justice investigation of the paper's closure. According to Comden, Southland, which owns AAN members Pasadena Weekly and Ventura County Reporter as well as applying paper San Diego CityBeat, "plans to open two (Los Angeles) newsweeklies, CityBeat LA and ValleyBeat, by summer."
San Diego CityBEAT published its inaugural issue last Wednesday, and the daily responds, "Bring it on." David L. Coddon writing in The San Diego Union-Tribune's weekly arts and entertainment guide, "Night & Day," says the new alt-weekly is trying to get a jump on both the daily and its 30-year-old alternative newsweekly rival, San Diego Reader, by publishing a day earlier. "Another 'voice' in local print media isn't bad," Coddon says.
The ink is barely dry on the sale of SLAMM, a San Diego music biweekly, but the new owners have set Aug. 21 as the launch date for a new redesigned alternative newspaper, San Diego CityBeat. The new weekly will target the 21- to 45-year-old crowd and San Diego's central university and historic neighborhoods, Publisher Charles Gerencser says. "I wouldn't have moved my pregnant wife and sold my house in Los Angeles, where I've lived my whole life, if I didn't think this was going to be an amazingly successful venture," Gerencser says.
