Casco Bay Weekly's co-founders, Monte Paulsen and Gary Santaniello, mourn the closure of the alternative newsweekly they opened in 1988. "It was glorious," Paulsen says of the early days in Portland, Maine, when the staff delivered the paper by themselves and the photographer worked in the staff bathroom. The paper closed Nov. 21, unable to stem financial losses and fight off competition from the Portland Phoenix.
Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger and author of the syndicated sex advice column "Savage Love," paid $200 for advice icon Ann Landers' typewriter and $175 for her desk. "I want that desk and that typewriter," Savage told a Northwest Herald reporter at an auction of the late Eppie Lederer's belongings. "That's what I came for."
The Center for Biological Diversity cares as much about the unarmored threespine stickleback as it does a cathedral forest of trees, which is why it is reinventing the environmental movement and could be saving Southern California in the process. LA Weekly's Susan Zakin follows the center's unlikely warriors on their daily rounds as they try to stop developers from turning one of Southern California's last natural rivers into a concrete-lined dump.
John Dicker, staff writer for the Colorado Springs Independent, describes how he physically defended the First Amendment against the combined might of the Colorado Springs human resources department after a rookie staffer turned over a police detective unexpurgated file. "I did consider bowling her over, but this woman was big, more linebacker than power forward," Dicker writes for AAN News. "Call me an effete East Coast twit, but I just couldn't manage it."
Gail Thompson transformed the New Haven Advocate "from a scruffy low-budget weekly into a community powerhouse," Carole and Paul Bass write in a story announcing her departure after 11 years as publisher. "Under her stewardship, the paper nearly tripled its sales, broadened its readership, broke major investigative stories and helped spawn such community events as City-Wide Open Studios and Film Fest New Haven," they write.
