In an area as large as Los Angeles, there are plenty of opportunities to serve niches, says Group Publisher David Comden, who recently launched two new weeklies in the market. Southland has assembled an all-star cast of alternative journalism veterans at LA CityBEAT and ValleyBEAT, and with the company's paper in Pasadena, now circulates 140,000 papers each week in the L.A. basin. Comden says he'll offer low-price options to advertisers and an "alternative to the alternative" for LA's younger readers.
Two California pastors who run XXXchurch, "the No. 1 Christian anti-porn site on the Web," have enlisted a midget in their crusade against self abuse. In a TV commercial playing on cable television, they show "Eddie the Midget" struggling in everyday life with his small stature before a narrator intones, "If only someone had warned Eddie that porn would STUNT HIS GROWTH!" Their next commercial shows kittens frolicking about before the narrator says, "Did you know that every time someone masturbates, God kills a kitten?"
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.
