Happy days may not be here again but, at long last, it's starting to look like a modest recovery.
Last year about this time, Miami New Times published a special report on the City of Miami, which had recently earned the dubious distinction of being named America's poorest big city. A year later, even as real-estate developers rush to build a sea of high-priced condos along Biscayne Bay -- wiping out modest apartments and single-family homes in the process -- New Times revisits the territory it explored last year, paying followup calls to people struggling to survive and the politicians who've made promises to help them.
The Chicago Tribune weighs in on the youth- paper movement and manages to move the ball upfield, reporting that single-copy sales of the Chicago Sun Times have declined amid the titanic struggle between its own free daily, Red Streak, and the Tribune's virtually-free RedEye. The Stranger's Dan Savage calls the new free dailies "like a cross between Us magazine and AP wire."
Following a nine-year absence, former account executive Lisa Rudy (pictured) returns to Detroit's alt-weekly to replace David Jost, who resigned as publisher last month. Rudy says Metro Times is her kind of paper: “I like everything it stands for. It’s just so community-based. It's hip, but it's real. I like the kind of reader that is interested in Metro Times, readers that like to be challenged.”
Automobile manufacturers are expected to spend $1.3 billion in online advertising this year, up 15% from 2002, according to a new study from Borrell Associates Inc. of Hampton Roads, Va. At the local level, dealers are now spending $2 on interactive advertising for every $3 they spend on local television.
The small, 24,000 circulation weekly, founded in 1996, appears to have published its final issue sometime around mid-August, reports John Ferri. The Reporter was hit hard by 9/11 and the brutal Pacific Northwest recession, which cut its annual revenue in half, according to the paper's owners. When talks to sell the weekly fell through, the undercapitalized paper couldn't hang on.
Ian MacKaye's Fugazi has survived 15 years in the music biz without ever coming close to selling out to a major label, all the while holding firm to the quaint notion that it's actually possible to give one's fans more than their money's worth. What could possibly be wrong with that? Plenty, says Michael Little, who complains that the band has "cast a long pall over the Washington, D.C., music scene" and saddled the area with humorless, moralizing music made by people who don't understand that rock is supposed to be hedonistic, degenerate, and lewd.
The offices of Denver’s alt weekly were transformed into a movie set last week for director John Sayles’ (pictured) next movie, Silver City. Presently lensing in the Mile High City, Sayles' film is about a “George W. Bush-like” character, played by Chris Cooper, who’s running for Colorado governor. Westword Editor Patricia Calhoun will have a small role in the movie if she doesn't end up on the cutting room floor.
As the American population grows older and as new car prices rise (even with incentives), the average buyer of new vehicles has ventured far into middle age. Among the major automakers, the average buyer's age ranges from 41 years old for the Volkswagen and Mitsubishi to 64 for the Buick.
If the print media were an ancient civilization, it would be the Gauls, getting pummeled into souffle by Caesar's legions. If it were a basketball team, it would be those patsies that always get clobbered by the Harlem Globetrotters by 100 points. And if print were a man, it would be Lou Costello, getting slapped around by a taller, better-looking guy who always got the girl. The Romans, the Globetrotters and, hey, Abbott would, of course, be broadcast television.
