Anyone "familiar with the alternative newspaper industry in Pittsburgh would have seen failure coming" at the Madison, Wis. faux-alt, argues Indiana University of Pennsylvania student Emily Jo Boots in the school newspaper. According to Boots, the Core Weekly train wreck was foreseeable because the paper was the brainchild of Catherine Nelson, the same publisher who oversaw the demise of both In Pittsburgh and Pulp in the Steel City. "It sounds to me like Nelson thinks that dumbing down a newspaper will make everyone want to read it," Boots writes after summarizing Core Weekly's business plan. "It seems that Nelson didn’t learn a thing when her business philosophy as a publishing consultant ran Pulp into the ground."
