The first issue of Pulse, "a new weekly magazine supplement targeting younger, active, single servicemembers," is scheduled to launch March 5. Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-authorized bastion of daily military news, says Pulse won't "be talking down" to its audience, unlike other dailies' youth pubs. "The staff working on this is under 30. The editor is under 30. We're going to try to tap our totally unique market to make this a magazine they want to read," Editor Danielle L. Kiracofe says.
Depending on whom you ask, stem-cell research is either a medical godsend or further proof that God is dead. This seminal research pits scientists against anti-choice zealots, old-school Republicans against new-school moralists, states against the Bush administration -- even reason against hysteria. As one observer tells LA Weekly's Steven Kotler, the "stem-cell debate is about everything but what it's about."
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.
