Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger and author of the syndicated sex column "Savage Love," goes home to Chicago, where Chicago Tribune arts critic Sid Smith catches up with him. "How did this North Side Catholic boy, the son of a Chicago homicide cop, become America's down-and-dirty (and gay) sex columnist -- and, now, defender of the Left?" Smith asks, and then provides some answers.
The Coast Guard and INS are being pumped up to fit into the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new bureaucracy, created by a bill Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., called a "hoax," the policing half of the INS "is bulking up like a football player in training, while the clerkish services division is shunted aside and told to make do with what it already has," writes Traci Rae Hukill of Monterey County Coast Weekly. "It's a case of enlargement of the enforcement gland. "
Why would a former San Francisco stockbroker travel to war-torn countries and refugee camps just to make people laugh? Clowns Without Borders takes Moshe Cohen to "zones of conflict" like Chiapas, where the laws of laughter are inverted, Bernice Yeung writes in SF Weekly. He tries to "bring a temporary lightness to places that have been shadowed by grief and hopelessness," she writes.
As the alternative newsweekly industry matures, competition from dailies and other media for the desirable 18-to-34 reader intensifies, E&P's Lucia Moses reports in this week's cover story. Despite the burgeoning youth-oriented offerings from daily media empires, "it may not be all that dire for alt-weeklies," she concludes. "They are a long way from being confused with dailies. They still write with more opinion and attitude, and take more risks."
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.
