The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Tim Redmond and Salt Lake City Weekly's John Saltas are joined by Amy Mitchell of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism for a wide-ranging discussion on the alt-weekly industry on Salt Lake City public radio station KUER. Among the topics covered: how alt-weeklies are faring on the web, the future of the industry and competing with the daily press.
Jeffrey Billman, who won first place for investigative reporting in the under-50,000 circulation category for his Orlando Weekly piece "Might Makes Right," will discuss the story with Weekly editor Bob Whitby in a conversation moderated by the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Tim Redmond. Like last week, the live chat will happen right here on AAN.org and will take place Friday at 3 pm EDT.
At the annual meeting of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies on Saturday, June 27, Willamette Week's Mark Zusman was elected the association's new president. He succeeds Metroland's Stephen Leon, who will take the advisory role of Immediate Past President. The membership voted on nine other board seats on Saturday, including two that were created just minutes earlier when AAN's bylaws were amended.
There will be up to ten board positions up for election at the annual meeting this Saturday in Tucson. So far, ten AAN members have thrown their hats into the ring for nine of the board spots; they tell us why they want to be on the board and what they think the most important issues facing the association are.
While last year's verdict in favor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian in its predatory pricing lawsuit against SF Weekly and Village Voice Media is being appealed, the Guardian claims VVM is ducking its debts and hiding its assets in an effort not to pay the $15.6 million it owes in damages. VVM executive editor Michael Lacey says that's not correct. "The case is on appeal. You are not entitled to a penny," he writes in a blog post.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian executive editor offers his take on the deal announced last week that will merge the Cleveland Free Times and Cleveland Scene under new owners Times Shamrock. He wonders why "VVM couldn't create a monopoly, [but] another newspaper outfit apparently can." He's referring to when the Justice Department nixed a similar 2002 deal between New Times and Village Voice Media (then two separate companies) that shuttered the Free Times. Justice forced the sale of Free Times to a group of investors, and the paper reopened in May 2003. "I'll leave it to you to speculate on why we couldn't do this deal, but Times Shamrock could," VVM executive editor Andy Van De Voorde says. Redmond says the Justice Department has yet to respond to his request for comment.
Executive editor Tim Redmond and former ad director Jody Colley were called as witnesses yesterday in the predatory pricing trial against the Weekly and Village Voice Media. Redmond's testimony centered on local ownership and the crucial matter of editorial spending. The Guardian is arguing that the Weekly was trying to put them out of business because it refused to cut editorial spending while it lost money overall. On the other hand, the Weekly reports that Redmond said he has had to struggle with laying off writers and editors over the past few years. "If [ad] revenue goes down, I have to cut costs. The Weekly editors don't have to meet that kind of budget; they can just get more money from headquarters," Redmond writes on the Guardian's blog. Colley, who is now the publisher of the East Bay Express, testified mostly about the Weekly's dealings with concert promoter Billy Graham Presents, which the Guardian claims is an example of illegal below-cost pricing. Her testimony will continue when the trial resumes this morning.
"The Bay Guardian and Media Alliance have succeeded in getting about 90 percent of the previously secret records in the (MediaNews/Hearst antitrust) case opened to public review," says editor Tim Redmond (pictured). "But you wouldn’t know that from reading the news stories in the monopoly dailies that the suit challenges." The San Francisco Chronicle and the Associated Press both botched the story, claims Redmond, because they ignored the fact that, among other things, the newspaper chains immediately agreed to surrender most of their secret documents when the Bay Guardian and its non-profit partner filed a motion to unseal the records in the case. The Associated Press reporter admitted his mistake, Redmond says: “I plead guilty to leaving out the background,” David Kravets told Redmond, who says the inaccuracies are emblematic of the "monopoly media world of the Bay Area, 2007."
That was one of the questions asked last night during a panel discussion in San Francisco on "The Coming Media Monopoly: Concentration of Press Ownership and Its Effects on Democracy." It will surprise few AAN members that panelists Stephen Buel, editor of Village Voice Media's East Bay Express, and Tim Redmond, executive editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, didn't see eye-to-eye on the matter. According to the "alternative online daily" BeyondChron, Buel said the Express' sale to VVM-predecessor New Times allowed the paper to hire more staff, purchase new computers and rent more office space. "In the past year, I've seen members of an alternative newsweekly buy houses in the Bay Area, and I think that's cool,” Buel said. Redmond disagreed, arguing that conglomeration results in homogenization of content and the pricing out of any true independent press.
