Odie Terry was among the winners named at Monday's awards dinner for the Acadiana Chapter of the Louisiana Restaurant Association, taking home the 2008 Associate Member of the Year award.
On Friday night, the alt-weekly teamed up with record store Amoeba Music, art collective Off Space and the de Young Museum to bring the pop artist's famed Manhattan art studio to the East Bay for a free party attended by "as many as 4,000 people." Rotating crews of 15-30 people spent more than a month transforming the recently vacated warehouse -- Express sales and marketing director Terry Furry himself spent two weeks building the red couch, and another week making a proto-disco coffee table from 1,800 tiny mirrors. "When I was in art school, Warhol was mainly frowned on for being commercial and marketing himself," Furry says. "But he kind of set the tone for what artists need to be to thrive. They need to market themselves as well as their art."
The paper is holding two "Wedding Wednesdays" where it will conduct free group weddings for twelve same-sex couples, "in celebration of the long overdue right for homosexual partners to legally marry in the state of California," according to a press release. The ceremonies will be conducted by Express marketing director Terry Furry on June 25 and July 2, with help from a local wedding planning company. In addition to the ceremonies, the Express will provide the twelve couples with a catered reception, honeymoon prize packages, professional photos, a published wedding announcement, and local media publicity.
Creative Loafing Media CEO Ben Eason (pictured) has tapped Coe to become the Atlanta paper's fourth publisher in less than three years, according to a story on its Web site. The last publisher, Michael Sigman, only lasted 10 days. Coe worked for New Times, Inc., for 17 years and Village Voice Media for three years before the two companies merged last October. "I felt like the opportunities for me in Atlanta were going to be greater than they might be in this combined, larger company," he says. Coe will be focusing on building revenue and expanding the weekly's online presence; editorial content "is best left to the editors," he says. Eason has also hired a new associate publisher for the newspaper: David Schmall, formerly of Sacramento News & Review, Minneapolis's the Rake and the Dallas Morning News' free commuter daily, Quick.
According to Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, Attorney General Jim Petro is looking for potential antitrust violations that would result from the merger. The paper quotes a senior attorney with Petro's office who said the deal "raises new concerns that combining these two publishing companies would eliminate or restrain competition between them in some markets where they operate rival newsweeklies with overlapping advertising and news coverage." (Ed.: VVM and New Times no longer operate "rival newsweeklies" in the same market.) The attorney was commenting in response to a letter complaining about the merger written by Terry Smith, the editor of AAN-member paper The Athens News.
