Alternative newsweeklies have what it takes to attract online advertising. They're highly local. They have a young, tech-savvy readership. But the papers are still in the Dark Ages when it comes to Internet advertising, says ad sales consultant Mike Blinder (pictured), who will speak at the AAN convention in San Antonio in June. He and other experts urge the industry to follow the lead of some of the larger AAN papers and make their Web strategies more cutting-edge.
Circulation of The Stranger has grown, and it's now 10,000 to 12,000 copies a week behind the more established Seattle Weekly, Mike Lewis reports in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Stranger publisher Tim Keck says the Weekly, which is regarded as more serious, is "boring." Weekly editor Knute Berger describes The Stranger, which is considered more humorous and sensationalistic, as "juvenile." Lewis writes that the two weeklies have "slowly, subtly become more like each other in an effort to establish dominance in a midsize media market...."
Atrocities like the torture and killings of unarmed civilians in Vietnam and the sexual humiliation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq are not the mere result of rogue soldiers but stem from what historian Christian Appy identifies as "a doctrine of atrocity," Nicholas Turse writes in The Village Voice. Turse cites military officers' descriptions of the Asian mind and now the Arab mind as one that only understands force. Four other writers also contribute articles to the Voice's special report on the lessons of Abu Ghraib.
In mid-April, editors of AAN papers waited in suspense to see a promised story discussing a memo by a U.S. official detailed to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Minutes before 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 20, the investigative piece by reporter Jason Vest was posted to the Web sites of two papers, The Village Voice and The Boston Phoenix. Over the following hours and days, AAN papers from New Haven, Conn., to Mill Valley, Calif., also published the story, in print, on the Web, or both. Alerted to the article by blogs, readers rushed to alt-weeklies' Web sites in droves.
Two weeks after it refused to continue carrying a church newspaper, Kroger is removing three other weekly papers from its free distribution racks. Louisville, Kentucky's alternative weekly, LEO, is among the banned. A Kroger spokesman told reporter Peter Smith of The Courier-Journal that the store's biggest issue with some of the publications was "the sexual nature of much of the advertising they contain." John Yarmuth, LEO's founder and executive editor, calls the ban "a horrible business decision."
Three-hundred new pedestal newspaper kiosks have been installed in downtown San Francisco, replacing free-standing racks, Joe Rogers reports for KCBS-740 AM. Media giant Clear Channel will maintain the new racks, which feature a billboard on the back. Mayor Gavin Newsom says the racks are intended to clean up some of the city's sidewalk clutter.
Visitors to online newspaper sites are more likely to be interested in politics than the general online population, according to a Nielsen// NetRatings Political View analysis of survey data conducted for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).
The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley governments is that they have been slow to embrace high-tech innovations, many produced by the 7,300 tech companies sitting in their backyards, William Dean Hinton reports for Metro Silicon Valley. In Santa Clara, you still have to view criminal records on microfiche, and there's no reliable search engine on the city of San Jose's Web site. The recognized leaders in E-government aren't on the West Coast but in cities like Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Mo.
Neil Goldschmidt admitted to sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl in the 1970s, when he was mayor of Portland, Ore. Under Oregon law, sex with a girl under 16 is considered third-degree rape. He told The Oregonian of Portland about the transgression after he learned that Willamette Week was preparing a story about it, Editor & Publisher reports. Goldschmidt was governor of Oregon from 1987-1991 and served as U.S. transportation secretary under President Carter. Recently, he stepped down as president of the Oregon Board of Higher Education, citing health problems.
Consumer magazines experienced their 11th consecutive month of ad page erosion, a pattern that could make 2004 the third straight year of declining magazine ad volume. According to estimates released last week by the Publishers Information Bureau, the magazine business once again ran in place during April, with ad pages down 0.5 percent against the same period in 2003 even though revenue jumped 6.8 percent. For the first four months of 2004, pages have declined 1.7 percent and revenue has grown 6.5 percent.
