By a two-vote margin, LA Weekly's advertising and promotional staff voted not to join the union that represents editorial employees, the Los Angeles Times reports. The close vote and hard-fought campaign have opened wounds Publisher Beth Sestanovich says she wants to heal.
The trend toward international justice could force journalists to compromise their craft and profession by testifying in tribunals. What’s bad for the media is bad for the public, Richard Byrne writes in the Boston Phoenix. Major news organizations on this side of the Atlantic are fighting subpoenas from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague.
Taffy Akner interviews New York Press Editor John Strausbaugh for mediabistro.com and finds it "hard to tell if Strausbaugh is the coolest dude ever... or the world's biggest geek." Conclusion? Whatever, he's a rock star.
Can Gannett Co. create alternatives to itself? Burl Gilyard, himself a former alt-weekly staff writer, looks into Gannett's plans to launch entertainment weeklies in Lansing, Mich., and Boise, Idaho, for AJR. Berl Schwartz, editor of the alt-weekly City Pulse in Lansing, says Gannett's targeting these small markets because it "wants to feed on the guppies before it heads to the deeper waters."
Katy Reckdahl wins a 2002 Casey Journalism Center Medal for Distinguished Coverage of Children and Family Issues. Her award in the non-daily newspaper category is for her "full and compelling report on the troubled Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth" that appeared last year in Gambit Weekly, the center's release states. The series won a first-place in the news feature category of the Alternative Newsweekly Awards.
Ads for apartments have skyrocketed in the past year, Chicago Reader Classifieds Manager Brett Murphy tells Crain's Chicago Business. The jump has fueled 25 percent growth in ad volume at a time when help-wanted ads are down, and landlords who once took out a single ad to find a tenant now run one for many weeks, he tells the business newspaper.
From London's wobbling Millennium Bridge to the collapse of the World Trade Center, engineer Tony Fitzpatrick has tackled some tough problems. Fitzpatrick, a San Francisco-based engineer and world-renowned authority on tall buildings, tells SF Weekly's Matt Smith that the most reasonable response to the World Trade Center disaster is also one of the simplest: improved fire codes for skyscrapers
LA Weekly has named Natalie Cole, formerly director of sales development and general merchandise for the Los Angeles Times, associate publisher. Cole is the third former LA Times ad executive hired in the past month by LA/OC Weekly Publisher Beth Sestanovich, who is herself a former advertising director for the Times.
