Jann Wenner and Mortimer Zuckerman want it. So do the Tribune Co. and the New York Times. "It" is New York magazine, which is perhaps coveted less for potential profits than for its media-historical cachet. Founded in 1968 by Clay Felker, who also owned and edited The Village Voice, New York's sharp take on the cultural and political life of the city and its hip version of service journalism invented the city magazine and had a profound influence on the development of the alternative newspaper. "For five or six years, Clay Felker's version of New York magazine did something revolutionary," New York Observer Editor Peter Kaplan tells The New York Times' David Carr. "It not only invented the city magazine, it restated the city around it. And that is a great thing."
Marnye Oppenheim, who wrote the "Bite Me" restaurant column for New Times Los Angeles for two years and continued it at Phoenix New Times, has died, the LA Times reports. She was 32.
Last week, DNA evidence led to an exoneration hearing for Ryan Matthews, who had been convicted of the 1997 killing of a Bridge City, La., grocer. For one man, the news means hope. For another, re-opening the wound of his father's death is agony. Gambit Weekly's Katy Reckdahl looks at all sides of this story of miscarried justice.
If you started at the beginning, in 1955, when The Village Voice was founded, and ranked companies by how much they spent on advertising in alternative newspapers, Tower Records would probably end up at the top of the list. After several years of financial difficulty, the Sacramento-based chain that has long been a beacon of pop culture was recently put on the block. "I expect that the new owners will keep the values ... we stand for," Russ Solomon, the company's founder and owner, tells The Sacramento Bee. "(W)hich is the idea that, as much as you can afford to, you represent as many kinds of music, video and books as you possibly can."
In any other universe, the concept of a disgraced former governor reinventing himself as a pastry chef -- and then siccing his high-powered Washington, D.C. lawyer on a newspaper that called him a "criminal" in a restaurant review -- would be too surreal for words. "But, hey, this is Arizona, a true alternate universe where J. Fife Symington, the only governor ever to resign from office following a conviction on felony bank-fraud charges, really did start whipping up desserts to die for after an appeals court threw out his case on a technicality," Phoenix New Times Editor Rick Barrs reports. Symington was pardoned by "that Krispy Kreme-eatin' bastard Bill Clinton" ... And really did get his tortes in a knot and make noises about suing after a Phoenix New Times food critic had the audacity to use the "c" word -- and we ain't talkin' "cheesecake" -- in a discussion of the various ways one can roll in dough."
Men Nguyen is a seven-card poker stud with 20 Visa cards at his disposal and a half-dozen lock-boxes containing hundreds of thousands of dollars. He travels with a band of adoring cardsharp proteges, fellow Vietnamese refugees, who tithe a percentage of their winnings to him while reverently calling him “Master.” LA Weekly's Michael Kaplan follows Nguyen into his tight-knit Vietnamese community and the world of high-stakes poker.
Joe Sullivan, publisher of Metro Pulse for 10 years, has sold the Knoxville, Tenn., weekly to Brian Conley, a general contractor who has development contracts with the city. Conley, who was briefly a co-owner of the Pulse in the mid-1990s, pledges he will guard the alt-weekly's editorial independence, even as it investigates his own dealings with the city (see story link below). Sullivan stays on as editor in chief and columnist.
