The Detroit Free Press looks at the brawl between AAN-member Metro Times and upstart Real Detroit Weekly. In this corner, Metro Times -- 20 years old and sophisticated, laden with narrative journalism, investigative stories, in-depth arts and music criticism, a paper for "people who read without moving their lips," Editor Jeremy Voas tells the daily. In the other, the challenger Real Detroit -- "all style and flash and talking trash," and unabashedly giving advertisers favorable coverage. Readers -- and advertisers -- will determine the winner, but Real Detroit has carved out a niche that's giving it about half the readership of the dominant Times, freelancer Christopher Walton reports.
The publisher of alternative weeklies in Chicago and Washington is talking with Todd A. Savage, a former Reader contributor who lives in Amsterdam, about starting an alt-weekly in the Netherlands, Crain's Chicago Business reports. Savage would be editor and publisher. "We hope it happens," Publisher Jane Levine tells Crain's. The Reader views it more as an investment in Savage's publication than the Reader starting its own European publication, Levine tells AAN News. Chicago Reader Inc. also has a stake in Seattle's Index Newspapers, which publishes The Stranger and the Portland Mercury.
Under a 137-year-old mining law, land freed from the protections of official designation as a wilderness study area is land that anyone can run a road through. And once that road is worn and claimed, future wilderness designation is next to impossible. But subsequent clarifications of the law have failed to douse the controversy over what can be defined as a road. For the wilderness contingent, a road is a "highway" that accommodates all four wheels of a jeep, truck or car. For developers and their friends in government, a road is merely that which allows the passage of vehicles, including dusty old hiking trails. Ben Fulton describes the Utah politics playing out over these issues and their impact on the Bush Interior Department's plans to open wild, remote areas to access and development.
Skip Oliva, president of the nonprofit organization Citizens for Voluntary Trade, filed a motion Tuesday with a federal court in Ohio to intervene in the Justice Department's antitrust case against Village Voice Media and NT Media. If granted intervention, Oliva says he will appeal the decision approving a government-mandated settlement in the closure of papers in Cleveland and Los Angeles. Oliva's 15-page brief to the U.S. District Court in Cleveland details numerous allegations of misconduct and unconstitutional abuse of prosecutorial power by Justice.
Outing Abe, Adolf, Jesus and other historical greats. The life of a young black dom on the streets in D.C. Gay predators of the new millennium. Homothugs on the down low come out in Brooklyn. Finding a Jewish mohel to circumcise a baby coming into a family composed of one lesbian and two gay men. It's all in The Village Voice's "Queer Issue."
