"It’s the stank of corporate America; everything within those walls designed and engineered for greatest selling power. Even me." The Local Planet Weekly's new staff writer, Melissa Amos, bids a more-bitter-than-sweet farewell to the department store jobs that sustained her through college. After five years, she knows that even the fine crystal has a smell all its own.
Yoga, once defined by asceticism, has become big, cushy business in America. Can it survive what some fear is the selling of its soul? Metro Silicon Valley's Russell Wild estimates yoga in America is a $27 billion a year industry, somewhere between the size of Dow Chemical and Microsoft. "What's next for the yoga biz, now that we've already seen the marketing of yogatards, yoga shoes, yogi pillows (stuffed with buckwheat hulls), the $1,200 'tantric bedroom set' (for adults only) and a battery-operated, inflatable 'Chi machine'?"
"You need this," claims the debut editorial as Southland Publishing launches two new alternative papers in the Los Angeles area after buying the assets of New Times L.A. "In recent years local readers have experienced their own pain when two local weeklies -- the Los Angeles Reader and the New Times L.A. -- were prematurely shuttered for no reason other than financial expediency," the editorial states. "They mattered, and then they were gone." For their part, the mantra of LA CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT is "to explore, to challenge, and to celebrate the substance and irreverence of our vast city."
The "electronic marketplace" syndication service will offer columns by Village Voice alums Andrew Sarris and Joe Conason, and others from the New York Observer, as well as news analysis from British-based New Internationalist after signing deals with the two publications.
"Self-revelation is often wrapped in sarcasm and the straightforward snapshot is a rarity," is how The Washington Post’s Libby Copeland describes the ads placed on Spring Street Networks, the online personals service used by Village Voice Media, New Times and many other publications that attract an urban demographic. The dating service for the age of irony, Copeland calls Spring Street, which claims about 950,000 users (compared with 8 million for Match.com).
