"The Adventures of Strangie," an anonymous weekly strip distributed online and in at least one Seattle neighborhood, is hell-bent on getting the Stranger -- and other Seattle publications -- to drop advertising from tobacco companies, the Seattle Times reports. The strip's main character is -- you guessed it -- Strangie, a tabloid-sized newspaper who is always pushing smokes on folks. In an open letter, the strip's creator calls on Stranger publisher Tim Keck, Seattle Weekly publisher Ken Stocker and two other Seattle publishers "to meet with each other and create a pact to stop advertising tobacco altogether." (S)he is also "calling on all employees to consider where your paychecks are coming from, and to stand up to your employers." Keck says he's not swayed by the comic. "Our readers are educated adults who can make up their own minds about smoking, drinking and fixed gear bikes," he tells the Times. "We've added their site to our 'Friends of The Stranger' Slog roll. Who doesn't love a didactic comic with the Space Needle as the protagonist?" UPDATE: The Seattle Times now reports that 37-year-old Seattle artist Jeff Weedman is the creator of "Strangie."
"This week's issue marks my last as editor," Bill Colrus writes in a farewell column. He's leaving the Chattanooga alt-weekly "for a new and exciting opportunity in the world of custom publishing," and will be replaced by current co-publisher Michael Kull. "This paper has been devoted to digging for bits of truth buried in mountains of dishonesty and spin, and I've been glad to man the shovel," writes Colrus, who was hired prior to the paper's launch in 2003. "As I leave, I am confident that The Pulse will continue its mission to give a voice to the voiceless, go deeper on stories when a superficial snapshot is not enough, and strive to tell the stories nobody else will tell."
"I'm not leaving The Stranger, and I'm still in charge of The Stranger's editorial content," says Dan Savage in a blog post, adding some detail to Wednesday's item in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer announcing Christopher Frizzelle's promotion to editor. "So Frizzelle is taking over the day-to-day management of the editorial department as well as overseeing more to most of The Stranger's features," Savage says. "I am still going to be sitting in my coveted corner office, watching helmetless hipsters ride by on their brand-new fixies, posting obsessively to Slog, working with Christopher -- and the rest of the editorial staff -- to create, shape, and direct our editorial content online and in print."
Christopher Frizzelle is replacing Dan Savage as editor of the Seattle alt-weekly, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. The 27-year-old Frizzelle has also worked at crosstown rival the Seattle Weekly, where "he was fired for leaking internal tidbits to the Stranger and trying to get a job there," according to the P-I. His time at the Stranger has thus far included stints as books editor, and most recently, as arts editor. "I'll report to Dan, who is now editorial director, and everybody else reports to me," he says. Asked what changes he wants to make, he said none. "The paper's really good right now. I work with 20 of the most talented people I know."
Graham Rayman's cover story last week, "Clearing the Air About 9/11's Toxic Dust and Cancer," doesn't refer directly to last year's Kristen Lombardi story on the same subject, but it "reads nevertheless like an unequivocal attempt at refuting its claims," according to the New York Observer. Lombardi's piece, which won a first-place AltWeekly Award for investigative reporting, stipulated that exposure to the Ground Zero rubble was giving rescue workers cancer, while Rayman's piece argues that research on the topic is murky. The Observer asks editor Tony Ortega, who fired Lombardi in May, if Rayman's story was a way of distancing his Village Voice from the version published under previous editor David Blum. "There was no conscious effort to 'tie' this cover to anything," he says. "New editor, new writer, and a new look at an evolving story. Call it weird if you like." He added: "The piece he wrote does contradict what has been written by other journalists, and what the Voice has written in the past. But that's the nature of journalism -- we're always gathering new evidence and trying to make sense of what we find."
The Observer joined the Innocence Project and other groups in asking a Texas judge to stop local officials from destroying a hair they say could exonerate a man executed for murder, Reuters reports. Claude Jones was put to death by lethal injection in 2000, when President George W. Bush was governor of Texas. "If the state of Texas did execute an innocent man, the people of Texas deserve to know what was done in their name," executive editor Jake Bernstein says. "This case begs for further examination."
When the New York Press was sold to Manhattan Media in early August, the new CEO announced the paper would stop running "explicit" ads. The National Organization for Women and some op-ed writers took that opportunity to put more pressure on the Voice and New York magazine to also stop running the ads. The Voice "fired back by defiantly running eight naked ladies on the cover" a few weeks ago, the New York Observer reports. Editor Tony Ortega tells the Observer that the cheeky cover was his idea. "The subject of our adult ads has been brought up lately in the local press," Ortega says. "I thought the best response from the newsroom was to poke some fun at ourselves." Manhattan Media CEO Tom Allon tells the Observer that, while he thinks "the punchline was only clear to a small sliver of their readership," he's glad to have stirred up the attention. "Clearly it was a nod to us and to our decision," he says. "I was flattered that they thought that a decision we made warranted a Voice cover."
"We held many discussions during our redesign process -- a fresher, more confusing Stranger hits the streets today -- about how we could better serve the public," editor Dan Savage writes. Somewhere along the way the paper came up with the idea of creating a new position: the public intern. "Just as the public editor works on behalf of readers, the public intern interns on behalf of readers. Steven [Blum] is your intern, Seattle, he works for you." His first assignment? Cleaning a Seattle bus. "I expected that the bus driver would kick me off at some point -- in my head my first report was going to end with an angry bus driver marching me down the aisle," Blum writes. "I'd already planned my passive aggressive response: 'People can shit their pants on the bus but I can't 409 the floor?'"
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