On April 26, 50,000-plus members of the National Rifle Association descended on Orlando for their annual meeting. They came to wave the flag, salute Charlton Heston, pat themselves on the back for getting George W. Bush elected, and check out tons of guns. Orlando Weekly Editor Bob Whitby spent three days embedded with the NRA and lived to tell the tale. A message from a woman speaker to the ladies: "I say if you are strong enough to carry a man's groceries and strong enough to carry a man's baby, you are strong enough to carry a man's gun."
Former LA Mayor Richard Riordan is looking for additional investors and has pushed the launch of his new weekly from June to September, the LA Times reports. Riordan now plans to put up only $1 million of his own money for the publication, leading some to question his commitment to the project, the Times reports. (Registration required)
The specialty coffee giant, which expects a record $4 billion in sales this year, has Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia in the fold now and sees no end to its growth. Rick Anderson looks at the java giant's stranglehold on the world market for latte in a cardboard cup. Starbuck's goal: 25,000 shops by 2013. "At this rate, Starbucks likely will challenge ubiquitous McDonald's (currently 28,000 restaurants in 118 countries) for Most Annoying Expansion," he writes.
Washington City Paper leads the field with six nominations in the eighth annual awards contest, followed by the Dallas Observer with five. Among individual contestants, Thomas Francis of Cleveland Scene and Heather Swaim of OC Weekly are nominated twice. The order of finish in the contest will be announced June 6 at the AAN Convention.
AAN papers pushed against ambivalence about both the Iraq war and how to cover it in recent months, producing the localized, alternative voice on the war that is the industry's hallmark. Yet, many editors tell AAN News' John Dicker that even making the obligatory anti-war protest pieces interesting was a battle. "The challenge for our papers is what a long bridge we have to build to write with any intelligence about Islamic communities, Iraqi refugees and the like without sounding like really distant observers," Willamette Week Editor Mark Zusman says.
Brad Aaron has resigned his position at Flagpole Magazine in Athens, Ga., due to "issues with some of our management practices and decisions," Editor and Publisher Pete McCommons writes in the April 23 edition (second item). Aaron's popular column, "City Dope," is "in abeyance," but "may reappear at some future time when government has run amuck and the bat signal beams to the sky," McCommons says.
Tom Grant, editor of the Local Planet Weekly, announces that he's leaving his job and running for mayor of Spokane, Wash. Grant has been a journalist for 23 years, primarily as an investigative television reporter. His reporting helped free more than a dozen innocent people from jail in the mid-1990s, and he recently helped uncover a secret deal in Spokane by which millions in taxpayer dollars were being diverted to the richest family in town. He has been with The Local Planet for two years.
Assistant News Editor Chris Lydgate has been chosen by the University of Michigan's Knight-Wallace Fellows program to be one of 12 journalists who will take a nine-month sabbatical to study in a field of their choice. Lydgate's specialty is emerging diseases and syndromes.
