After declaring his split with conservatives and the administration's war policy in Seattle Weekly, Philip Gold, an old-line right-wing intellectual, has resigned his post as a defense analyst at Seattle's conservative Discovery Institute, Seattle Times reports. Gold, who has also been on talk radio debating Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger, says, "Conservatives have lost their soul," but he can't join the "blame-America-first-crowd" either.
Yes, alternative weekly readers are aging, but that's mainly because "there are just too many people in America getting too damn old," argues John Morrison of the Alternative Weekly Network. Analyzing Media Audit data, Morrison establishes conclusively that alternative weekly readers between the ages 35-54 are actually younger than the general population of 18 to 34-year-olds. Well, maybe they're not physically younger, but they go to more movies, attend more concerts, ride their bicycles more often, and even drink more beer than the Gen X and Y'ers who are young enough to be their children. If they had any children, that is.
Prosecutors investigating the New Times-Village Voice Media deal that closed New Times LA and Cleveland Free Times worked through the weekend taking depositions, according to the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten. Sources familiar with the depositions told Rutten that prosecutors "repeatedly returned to questions concerning the nature of alternative journalism and the impact of New Times' closure on local news coverage." One unidentified witness said many of the prosecutors' questions "seemed to be driven by their belief that unlike a mainstream daily newspaper, an alternative weekly is suffused throughout with a particular point of view. They seem to believe that losing an alternative paper is a greater hardship to the community in that way than losing a mainstream daily."
Florida police have perfected the art of sweet-talking their way into homes, neatly circumventing the Fourth Amendment. Orlando Weekly's William Dean Hinton looks at what cops call "knock-and-talk," or "knock-and-announce." Sounds innocent, but isn't, Hinton concludes.
"We're relieved the Justice Department has decided to draw a line in the sand in this case," Michael Lacey, executive editor of New Times, sarcastically tells LA business columnist, Daniel Akst. The columnist chides New Times and Village Voice Media for being sanctimonious about the evils of "big-city dailies" but concedes Lacey's point: "If a generation's worth of media consolidation is OK because of new technologies and competition between broadcasters, print outlets, the Internet and so forth, it probably shouldn't be a hanging offense that a couple of unsuccessful weeklies are closing in concert."
Has the Sierra Club become just another faction of the Democratic Party? Four Utah environmentalists find themselves in the forefront of a nationwide revolt against the leadership of the club for putting politics ahead of the environment. The primary object of their ire? Executive Director Carl Pope. "But critics say the 700,000-member strong organization with an estimated $80 million annual budget is now nothing more than a glorified hiking club that has sold out the environment to get buddy-buddy with Democratic politicians," Shane McCammon writes.
