"The RedEye will be the newspaper equivalent of the middle-aged bald guy with a ponytail," Richard Karpel, executive director of AAN, tells Shirley Leung, a Wall Street Journal reporter. Leung looks at the precipitous flight of younger readers from daily newspapers and the checkered history of their attempts to recapture them. Chicago Reader Editor Alison True questions the entire strategy of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, which both launched youth-oriented weekday tabloids this week, RedEye and Red Streak, respectively. "Younger readers don't pick up a daily, so let's give them a daily?" True asks.
"When the news came, we threw out everything we'd planned for this week's issue and spent an hour or so sitting around a conference table watching the grim details accrue on TV," Steve Perry, editor of City Pages (Twin Cities) writes in an introduction to an entire issue devoted to the memory of Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minnesota. "We talked about people we might interview, stories we might write; we talked about our own memories and impressions of Paul Wellstone. And in the end we decided the worthiest thing we could do was simply to find some of the many folks whose paths had crossed his during a life devoted to fighting other people's battles, and let them tell their stories."
The Chicago Sun Times' new youth-oriented tabloid Red Streak hit the streets today opposite the Chicago Tribune's RedEye. "Both papers featured slick designs and a paucity of original content," Jeremy Mullman writes in Crain's Chicago Business. Both tabloids launched Web sites today as well.
"Sometimes, dressing like a woman can make a guy feel even more like a man." Chris Wright speaks from experience, having enlisted the services of Veronica Vera, the best cross-dressing coach in the business. Wright describes his night on the town in the Boston Phoenix. "In the space of an hour or so, I had my breasts prodded, twiddled, tweaked, squeezed, cupped, and, finally, patted."
Jeannette Batz's story, “The Right to Answers,” was a finalist in the inaugural Awards for Reporting on the Environment by the Society of Environmental Journalists. Batz’s feature examined whether toxic pollution caused the death of infants in the St. Louis suburbs.
Taylor Mead, an writer, artist and actor with more than 100 movie credits, lives in a two-room, tub in kitchen apartment piled with stuff and crawling with roaches. The 77-year-old artist's eviction date has come and gone, and the "hardcore boho" is a little worried, C. Carr writes in The Village Voice. "This is not just someone with a total disregard for ordinary comfort, but someone with a complete inability to make a life outside of impulse and the aesthetic that springs from impulse," Carr writes.
