An anti-trust lawyer tells NPR's Laura Sydell that the VVM-New Times deal looks like a clear anti-trust violation: "It was very public what they did, and my only feeling is they could not have had any anti-trust advice." The Bay Guardian's Tim Redmond decries the deal and compares it to the monopolization of local dailies, which, he argues, was the reason the alternative press "sprung up" in the first place. But AAN's Richard Karpel says there weren't enough ad dollars to sustain two large alternative weeklies in LA and Cleveland, and U. of Maryland j-school dean Thomas Kunkel says he was surprised by the investigation: "Anyone who is looking at the Justice Dept.'s attitude towards this sort of transaction in the near past might wonder what the fuss is about." After all, he notes, Justice didn't seem terribly disturbed as cities around the country became one-newspaper towns.
"Does the U.S. Department of Justice really have so little to do it must investigate why a couple of alternatives were folded?" E&P asks in a Nov. 25 editorial. With so many media outlets in both the Los Angeles and Cleveland markets where the two alternative weekly chains closed papers to end head-to-head competition, advertisers have plenty of places to go. "It's not an argument Justice can make with a straight face," E&P concludes.
Charles Whitaker, director of the Academy for Alternative Journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, says the Chicago dailies' two new youth-oriented weekday tabs "are neither hip, nor smart, nor in any way sophisticated." Whitaker, a former editor of Ebony, says he'd hoped the Tribune and the Sun Times would have used their considerable resources to achieve "a radical rethinking of what newspapers are and what they can be. ... Boy, was I wrong."
Lael Morgan tells E&P's Lucia Moses that buyers have been calling since Casco Bay Weekly was shuttered two weeks ago. Morgan blames the economy and the Portland Phoenix for the weekly's closure. "We haven't had a national ad since they arrived," she tells E&P.
Greg Mitchell had a silver screen moment when he parlayed his long hair into a photo shoot for the 1977 low-budget film "Between the Lines." Set in Boston at a fictitious alt-weekly, the Back Bay Mainline was obviously modeled on the two Boston papers then in a fight to the death, the Phoenix and The Real Paper. Jeff Goldblum went on to become a star after playing the Mainline's "scuzzy rock critic."
How does a country on the edge of war look? Four partiers board a subway wearing fatigues and gas masks. Frustration mounts at an anti-war protest meeting. New York City is theoretically divided into hot, warm, and cold zones of chemical contamination. Graduate journalism students at Columbia University record their observations as a series of vignettes for The Local Planet Weekly "It's the same approach we used for 'Seven Days at Ground Zero,'" which won a 2002 Alternative Newsweekly Award for feature writing, says Planet Editor Tom Grant, who is also a Columbia graduate.
Responding to Michael Ryan's "It's Not Norman Mailer's Village Voice Anymore," which uses the anti-trust investigation of the New Times-Village Voice deal as a platform to excoriate alternative newspapers, AAN Executive Director Richard Karpel says, "The Village Voice and New Times are for-profit companies subject to the same economic rules as every other business: Their papers need to make money so they can pay employees and vendors, and if they don't they have to shut down."
