When you call us wealthy monopolist bullies, "(d)o you mean this in the positive sense of wealthy, monopolist bullies?" New Times' Michael Lacey asks the Wall Street Journal, which last week ran a commentary by Daniel Akst on the New Times-Village Voice Media antitrust investigation. In his letter to the editor, Lacey says the Justice Dept. "is trying to create legal theory with this ... probe", which he calls a "stunning grab for unprecedented federal power." In a separate letter, Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger (and AAN Editorial Awards Host-for-Life), says his paper was "distressed to be lumped in with other alternative weekly papers."
Is statutory rape culturally acceptable in Hartford's Latino community? The Hartford Advocate's Chris Harris explores a relationship that, while prosecutable by law, is often accepted as a part of life among Latinos. "I think that I would say that we don't look at it as statutory rape," says Carmen Rodriguez, president of La Casa de Puerto Rico, a nonprofit agency dedicated to the social, economic, and political well-being of Hartford's Puerto Rican community. "We look at it as a young girl who'll be marrying an older man. It happens and it's allowed to happen because marriage is expected."
The Justice Department's investigation of the Village Voice Media-New Times deal to close weeklies in Cleveland and Los Angeles is apparently driven by a concern "that the assisted suicide of New Times in Los Angeles reflects a narrowing of political perspectives in the city, and that it is the government's responsibility to create more ideological space," Harold Meyerson writes. He adds that if investigators really looked they would find at least as much "ideologically driven or monomaniacal" editorial slant at the dailies as at alternative newsweeklies.
Starting new alternative newspapers has been suggested as one legal remedy to the controversial closing of the Cleveland Free Times and New Times Los Angeles, Lucia Moses reports in E&P. Even without legal orders, new papers are "moving to fill the void," she writes. "Silver Lake Press, a 30,000-distribution biweekly in eastern L.A., will change its name to Los Angeles Alternative Press and expand distribution next month, while in Cleveland former Free Times staffers started a new alternative monthly, Urban Dialect."
Hundreds of people wandered into D.C.'s Pershing Park on the morning of Sept. 27 — activists looking for a protest, nurses in town for a conference, lawyers headed to work, and a cyclist training for a race. And there was District of Columbia Police Chief Charles Ramsey with his troops, ready to arrest them all. Washington City Paper's Jason Cherkis looks at the mass arrests during a peaceful protest and their aftermath. "As video footage and first-person accounts show, the park events constitute one of the most serious collective violations of civil rights in this city since the Vietnam War era," he writes.
Richard Riordan is preparing a prototype of a new weekly newspaper, The Los Angeles Examiner. The prototype, a 50-page tabloid, should be complete next week and "will be shopped around to prospective advertisers and investors," the Los Angeles Business Journal reports. Ken Layne, a member of the Examiner’s editorial staff and co-founder of the LAExaminer.com Web site, says the weekly would be a politically oriented, L.A.-centric paper aimed at affluent readers featuring commentary from well-known political writers and Hollywood insiders, but no sex ads. Former New Times Los Angeles writer Jill Stewart is a contributor to the prototype.
Champaign, Ill.'s, alternative newsweekly, formerly called The Octopus, ceased publication earlier this month. Saga Communications, which bought the financially strapped paper from Yesse! Cmmunications in 2001, was never able to make it self-sustaining, The News-Gazette reports. Publisher Kristine Foate says she and General Manager Kathy Schuren will continue to work for Saga in its Illini Radio Group. The other five full-time staffers will lose their jobs unless a new buyer takes them on.
Saddam's crimes, al Qaeda massacres, Kurdish freedom, oil worth fighting for... and a few other things "potluck peaceniks" might want to think about when they gather to protest the imminent war with Iraq, courtesy of columnist Christopher Hitchens. "The government and people of these United States are now at war with the forces of reaction," Hitchens writes in The Stranger. Even when faced with the the genocidal record of Saddam Hussein's regime, "nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority that surrounds those who intone the 'peace movement.,'" he says.
University of Chicago alumni Brian and Jan Hieggelke have agreed to print and distribute a campus paper, the Chicago Weekly News, with copies of Newcity included as an arts and culture supplement, Crain's Chicago Business reports. The arrangement boosts Newcity's circulation to 55,000, Co-Publisher Brian Hieggelke tells Crain's.
