Howard Blume says no "upstart" among the "lower-budget alternatives" springing up in the LA Basin will challenge LA Weekly citywide. The paper has fired Valley Business Printers, owner of its newest competitor, Southland Publishing Co., Blume reports. Southland purchased the assets of the closed New Times LA, plans a summer launch of weeklies in L.A. and the Valley, and has hired Editorial Art Director Dana Collins away from LA Weekly. Plus former LA Weekly Publisher Michael Sigman is consulting with Southland, Blume writes.
Jane Levine, chief operating officer of Chicago Reader, Inc., is beginning the search for a publisher, who will handle day-to-day operations. When that person is in place and trained, Levine will step back and decide what her role will be at the company. Levine has been in alternative newsweeklies since she started as an intern at the Reader in 1973. "I can't even think what the next step will look like until we have a great publisher in place and I know what their skills are," she says. "Right now there are too many trees in my way to see the forest."
Debut literary journal The Believer brings together the talents of novelist Heidi Julavits, Village Voice Senior Editor Ed Park and author Vendela Vida, with the backing of Dave Eggers and McSweeney's, Newsweek reports. The Believer, which has no advertising, isn't paying its editors yet, although they all want to be "critically engaged," Julavits tells Newsweek.
Last week East Bay Express exposed that the Memphis weekly, which calls itself "The Mid-South's Best Alternative Newspaper," had run a plagiarized story about a police scandal, changing Oakland to Nashville but virtually nothing else. Now Memphis Flyer reveals that the paper has been running stories stolen from New Times and Village Voice Media papers for years under the byline Larry Reeves. The mysterious Reeves can't be found, apparently has been writing for free, may be 80 years old, and no one has ever met him. Reeves' pattern is to cut-and-paste stories from AAN member papers, "localized" with a little search and replace on city names. "You can't get that mad because the whole operation is like amateur night," Cleveland Scene Editor Pete Kotz tells the Flyer. "It's so bad it's amusing."
