Saint Louisian Leo White, aka the "One-Wheel Roller," has won more than 54 regional competitions since he began skating at age six. With his ability to slip into a low, stealthy, single-skate glide from a full-throttle roll, White is the skating equivalent of the drool-inducing basketball player who can charge down the court at Formula One speed, then stop, pop and bury a jumper from 15 feet in transition, writes Mike Seely of the Riverfront Times. This week, he's attending the World Championship of Performing Arts in Los Angeles. Whether he relocates to LA may be the million-dollar question for the One-Wheel Roller, whose niche is anything but sure-fire bankable, Seely says.
Albuquerque’s alt-weekly will be moving to new digs downtown sometime early this winter. The paper purchased the building for $600,000 from a local attorney and will now be able to consolidate offices under one roof after spending years with departments scattered in different buildings.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian wins two first place awards in the National Newspaper Association's 2002 Better Newspaper Contest: Tali Woodward for Best Health Story, and Dan Zoll for Best Education/Literacy Story. Willy Stern of the Nashville Scene takes a first in Best Investigative or In-Depth Story or Series for his five-part dissection of The Tennessean.
Wilderness tourism in British Columbia is a $1.5-billion dollar business, but it puts wildlife at risk. Georgia Straight's Ben Parfitt looks at the degradation to the environment caused by hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world zipping around in Zodiacs looking at whales or skiing, hiking, snowmobiling and rafting. Many people, even some in the tourist industry, are beginning the see eco-tourism "as a snake swallowing its own tail," he writes.
Pete Kotz, editor of the surviving alt-weekly in Cleveland, admits it's "bad form to dance on the grave of another. " Honesty, however, "runs by a less civilized code," Kotz writes of the deal between New Times and Village Voice Media last week that shuttered VVM's Cleveland Free Times and New Times Los Angeles. "The Free Times' death wasn't unexpected or sudden. It was long, slow suicide," Kotz says. And he charges David Eden, the editor, with turning the paper into "a barking poodle with no house training."
Harold Meyerson reports that "after a bitter campaign that stunned many longtime Weekly workers," advertising and promotion personnel rejected unionization by a 15-13 vote. Meyerson says management's "campaign came straight from the pages of Union Avoidance 101" and calls the post-vote Weekly "a company with its nerves on edge. Ad reps don't speak to other ad reps; friends avoid friends."
