Columnist Daniel Gray-Kontar and cohorts are aiming Urban Dialects, a new monthly magazine, at young city and inner-ring suburban dwellers. "There is always a new paper popping up. You don't get too excited about one or the other," Pete Kotz, editor of New Times' Cleveland Scene, tells The Plain Dealer. Village Voice Media closed Cleveland Free Times in October under an agreement with New Times to close its competing paper in Los Angeles.
Divers Alert Network is a Durham, N.C.-based nonprofit that's internationally respected for its mission of "divers helping divers." But a four-month investigation by The Independent's Jennifer Strom found that behind the $14 million-a-year enterprise, directors were accusing their longtime CEO and corporate counsel of also helping themselves.
Russ Smith tells Baltimore City Paper, which he co-founded in 1988, that he plans to return to the city and write full-time. Smith recently sold New York Press and tells City Paper he's tired of the "high-octane" Big Apple, where his TriBeCa apartment was uninhabitable for weeks after Sept. 11. "I'd like my boys to have a real backyard and house, Melissa [his wife] to have a garden, all that stuff. Also, I'm 47 now, and it's not like I go out to clubs at midnight anymore," Smith says.
Gail Collins, editorial page editor of The New York Times; best-selling author and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean; NPR commentator Sarah Vowell; satirist Neal Pollack; and Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company, all share one thing -- stints at alternative newsweeklies early in their careers. These former alt-weekly staffers talk with AAN News about success in the big leagues and reflect on their roots and the state of the alt-weekly industry. And for good measure, musician-turned-alt-weekly-art-director Victor Krummenacher also shares his experiences with fame and the alternative newsweeklies that covered him.
Weekly Planet (Tampa) has laid off three editorial staffers -- News Editor Francis X. Gilpin and staff writers Trevor Aaronson and Rochelle Renford -- citing flat revenue and a desire to shift focus from political to cultural coverage, the St. Petersburgh Times reports. Neil Skene, senior vice president, group publisher, of the Planet's parent company, Creative Loafing, says the weekly will now use freelance writers for political coverage.
This is not just a sartorial question in Jefferson Parish, La., where two prosecutors have been wearing their hand-painted neckties showing a hangman's noose and a grim reaper during capital punishment trials. After helping The New York Times break the story of the dubious prosecutorial neckwear, Katy Reckdahl goes deep into issues of lingering racism and the scars of history in Louisiana.
