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.
In a desperate bid to attract young readers "who have been deserting daily newspapers in droves and driving news executives to distraction," mainstream media companies "are churning out ... easy-to- read publications that are light on serious journalism, heavy on the partying scene, and, for the most part, free," reports Mark Jurkowitz. "I think it's a silly strategy because it's all about what they're putting out in daily papers that's driving [young] readers away,'' Nashville Scene's Albie Del Favero tells Jurkowitz. ''Daily newspapers in general write in a style that is not at all appealing to young readers.''
Army Spc. Justin Hebert was the 52nd American soldier killed in Iraq since President Bush declared the war over on May 1 and the first combat fatality of this war from the state of Washington. Friends, family and veterans bade him farewell in the quiet valley where he was born and raised, and then he was buried in one of the special caskets reserved just for soldiers. "As they laid Justin Hebert to rest, it was hard to square the death of the 20-year-old with what we know now about the invasion of Iraq," Rick Anderson writes in Seattle Weekly.
