Dan Savage, editor of Seattle's The Stranger and writer of the syndicated column Savage Love, continues to moonlight as a political activist, according to the Chicago Reader. (See second item.) His current efforts are focused on unseating arch-nemesis Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn. But in an interview with Stephen Morse, a reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian, a University of Pennsylvania student newspaper, Savage reserves much of his invective for Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli, a potential spoiler who could siphon off votes from Democratic candidate Bob Casey Jr. In a video clip of the session, Savage says, among other things, "Carl Romanelli should be dragged behind a pickup truck until there's nothing left but the rope." Savage later apologized for the remark on the Stranger's blog.
Micheal Beaumier gleaned a cache of colorful anecdotes and bawdy tales while in charge of the Chicago Reader's personal ads from 1998 to 2005. Now he has parlayed them into a book, I Know You're Out There: Private Longings, Public Humiliations and Other Tales From the Personals. No lonely heart is spared in Beaumier's tell-all, not even his own. "I went from watching the freak show … to finding myself in the freak show," Beaumier admits. In a Chicago Tribune interview, Beaumier, 39 and single, says he is looking to take some of his own medicine.
John Conroy first embarked on the police brutality beat in 1989, when he covered the story of Andrew Wilson, a convicted cop killer who alleged that his confession had been coerced by electric shock torture. Conroy's subsequent reporting for the Chicago Reader has resulted in several awards -- and multiple subpoenas. "I bet you that there's not another paper in the country that has been willing to let one person do what I have done for so long, at such cost, in terms of every story we do involves extensive legal review," Conroy tells Editor & Publisher. The complete story is available to subscribers here.
In an article appearing in the Oct. 17, 1979 issue of the Wall Street Journal, David Blum exhibited an early fascination with the alt-weekly format. Blum, who was recently named editor of the Village Voice, wrote: "Some newspapers do a lot of strange things. Take the Chicago Reader." In addition to exploring the Reader's free-classifieds strategy and its strong hold on both readers and advertisers, Blum questioned the paper's lack of political coverage: "[Co-owner Robert] Roth dates the paper's first issue, that of October 1971, as 'five months after the Kent State Shootings' -- which would seem hardly the time for an alternative paper to concentrate on suggesting what to do on a Saturday night." Blum's article is available for $4.95 in the Wall Street Journal archives.
David Jones (pictured) tells AAN News that after "doing this particular job in this particular (very special) place" for such a long time, he plans to return to writing and possibly teaching. While he won't miss "squidging things around a (computer) screen," that doesn't mean it isn't difficult for him to leave the Reader. "We still do some amazing things here, every week, of course, and I'll feel strange not having my hands on any of it anymore," he says.
Most of the ads cited in the fair-housing lawsuit recently filed against the free-classifieds juggernaut "would not strike an ordinary person as discriminatory," says Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. Nevertheless, newspapers have lived with the "persnickety" Fair Housing Act for many years now, writes the Chicago Reader's Michael Miner after hearing from several AAN classified directors who vigilantly scour their housing ads to ensure compliance. But that doesn't mean alt-weeklies should be thrilled by the suit. "We have two dogs in this fight," says Chicago Reader Executive Editor Mike Lenehan. "(W)e shouldn't be too eager for them to lose this suit, because we're all in the online business too."
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