Urban Dialect in Cleveland and Los Angeles Alternative Press in California are filling the holes left by the closure of New Times Los Angeles and Cleveland Free Times. The two young publishers – Daniel Gray-Kontar in Cleveland and Martin Albornoz in L.A. – see a place for a new generation's "alternative" alternative weeklies.
As the nation weathers another space-shuttle tragedy, Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze traveled the debris trail this weekend, tracing not only the doomed spacecraft's final trajectory, but the many "Last Rites" offered by the people of east Texas. "There's chunks of it on my dad's ranch," an excited man announces in a diner. Schutze follows them and others to look at debris from outer space, a chase first exciting and then grim when body parts are found along the Louisiana border.
Despite its undisputed status as one of the world’s preeminent centers for sex research, the Kinsey Institute is not an easy place to find. NUVO's Summer Wood became lost on Indiana University’s sprawling Bloomington campus on her way to visit the institute, and few of the students admitted to knowing of the institute’s existence, let alone its location. Several young men mumbled red-faced excuses of “I don’t know anything about that place” before a biology student proved willing to drop her off outside the institute’s unsigned entrance. The student did say, however, that she didn’t really agree with “the kind of work that goes on there.”
"It's absurd to ascribe a monolithic set of attitudes and beliefs to all 116 papers that are members of our group," AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel writes in the letters section of Jim Romenesko's Web site. To make his point, Karpel contrasts the Chicago Reader's "cerebral, mostly apolitical" journalism with the "unabashedly liberal" sledgehammer approach of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Still on the alternative weekly beat, Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times critiques former mayor Richard Riordan's new weekly prototype and finds the LA Examiner aimed at the people who elected him -- affluent, educated and mostly white. Rutten, who reported on the antitrust investigation of Village Voice Media and New Times, takes a last slap at the two chains for "a sad and venal chapter in an otherwise vigorous -- often courageous -- history" of the alternative press in Los Angeles.
The case involves the alleged rape of one mental patient by another mental patient on a Phoenix-area psych ward, but it's taken the government to really make things crazy. Phoenix New Times staff writer Paul Rubin reports that Maricopa County prosecutors are charging a man with the rape - - while private attorneys hired to defend the county in a civil case are arguing that, in fact, the rape never happened. And taxpayers are paying for both sides. All quite schizophrenic.
The Sacramento Kings’ popular center is using the same sign language Serbs used to terrorize Muslims. And the NBA star is OK with that, even if some basketball fans aren't. To many its meaning is obvious: three points. But not to all. "Muslims and Croats in America and Europe, will read it as a symbol of hate, intimidation and terrorism - -as recognizable and despicable to them as the strong-arm salute of the Nazis," Cosmo Garvin writes in the Sacramento News & Review.
Tom Finkel, editor of City Pages (Twin Cities) until mid-2002, returns to his hometown of St. Louis and to New Times as the new editor of Riverfront Times. He replaces Jim Nesbitt. Before taking the position to Minneapolis, Finkel was managing editor of Miami New Times. "I'm thrilled to be able to move back to my hometown and be a part of the Riverfront Times," Finkel says. He starts March 3.
