Gary Leonard, a veteran freelance photographer whose work has appeared in LA Weekly, LA Reader, New Times Los Angeles and LA CityBeat, kept his gubernatorial petition in his shirt pocket and whipped it out at enough shoots to get on the recall ballot, the Studio City Sun reports. Leonard is scheduled for the Tonight Show Sept. 22, and tells the Sun, "I even impressed my parents."
Sacramento is home to some of the world's strangest Star Trek tribute bands, as documentary filmmaker Roger Nygard has discovered. SN&R's Cosmo Garvin tagged along when Nygard recently shot some film for the sequel to his successful documentary "Trekkies," and found bands like No Kill I, Warp 11, and Stovokor were entertaining fans with all sorts of variations on the Star Trek mystique.
James E. Dible becomes the first non- member of the Mead family to head the Erie, Pa., publishing company that owns majority stakes in AAN-members Cleveland Free Times and the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO), as well as the daily Erie Times-News, Editor & Publisher reports. Dible, 60, helped start Cyberlink, an Internet company, and the paper's GoErie.com Web site. He replaces Michael Mead, 65, who is retiring.
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt is selling himself as the next EPA chief on the strength of his reputation as a consensus builder. It's an easy pose, as long as you hand-pick your negotiating partners. Environmental groups in Utah and around the nation view the boyish 52-year-old with justified suspicion. Is he the stealth industry shill who can sell the Bush anti-environment agenda? Salt Lake City Weekly's Jake Parkinson talks to Leavitt's friends and foes.
In a fitting tribute, the paper dedicates the Best of New Orleans issue to its former ad director, who succumbed to cancer earlier this week. “Sue represented the best of Gambit,” says publisher Margo DuBos. “In a lifetime, you can only hope to know someone as wonderful as Sue.” News & Reviews’ Jeff von Kaenel, who worked with Crichton to organize AWN, says, “Putting it together was complicated because getting alternative newspaper publishers to work together is like herding cats. And Sue was one of the few people I met who could herd cats.”
Sue O’Connell and Jeff Coakley yesterday acquired the largest gay-and-lesbian newspaper in New England and a Boston neighborhood paper, according to Dan Kennedy. Coakley was the Phoenix’s director of classified advertising in the mid ’90s; O'Connell served two tours of duty as the paper's entertainment sales manager before leaving in 1998 to become associate publisher of Bay Windows, a 22,000- circulation publication targeting the region's GLBT community.
