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.
Nashville-based NWA/TNA, an upstart wrestling organization, is taking on the giant of the pro wrestling world, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Robert L. Doerschuk looks at this mythic business struggle that's playing out with all the spectacle of the wrestling ring -- complete with "faces" -- the good guys -- and "heels" -- the bad 'uns. "Growing numbers of viewers are burning out on WWE's weekly programming, in which [the] stars are run through skits involving necrophilia, murder, racism, blasphemy and other ponderously provocative angles," he writes. "This weariness, measured by WWE's plummeting ratings, may give NWA/TNA its best chance to bring the giant down."
