Media critic Michael Anft announces he is ending his 20-year on-and-off relationship with Baltimore City Paper and retiring "to flip through heretofore-unread copies of The New Yorker and Harper's." Anft takes a parting shot at "the mostly uninspired local product we unfortunate viewers/readers/listeners have spewed at us."
The mainstream media in the United States has ignored wire service and European newspaper coverage of long-standing plans to run an oil pipeline from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean through Afghanistan, Ted Rall reports in an exclusive article on Philadelphia City Paper's Web site. "The 'war on terrorism' was less about fighting terrorism, or finding the perpetrators of 9-11, than about bombing Afghanistan" to secure a stable route for the pipeline, Rall writes.
Illinois Times has hired Patrick Arden, former managing editor of the Chicago Reader, as editor. The paper has also moved to a new address, redesigned its cover, consolidated entertainment listings, and changed its tag line. “The capital city’s newsweekly” expects fourth-quarter performance to be strong, says Associate Publisher Sharon Whalen.
Advertising staff at LA Weekly are to vote Friday on whether to join the union that already represents editorial employees at the alt-weekly. Editorial staff are shocked that management is resisting extending union representation to ad staff because the paper has always had an ardently pro-union editorial stance, reports the Los Angeles Times. Publisher Beth Sestanovich, however, tells the Times she pushed for a vote rather than the more pro-forma card check organizing because "while our editorial policy is pro-union, it also is pro-democracy."
The Forest Service says our national forests must be logged to save them from fire. Was the Forest Service claiming portions of Lassen National Forest were dead and posing a fire danger just so it could allow commercial logging to proceed? It was, until Chad Hanson came along. "What the Forest Service is about to do, [Hanson] says, is large-scale commercial logging under the guise of fire prevention and environmental restoration," Cosmo Garvin writes in Sacramento News & Review.
AAN Associate Member Featurewell.com celebrates its second birthday having built its reputation on solid relationships with both writers and some 900 publishers, Tech Central Station reports. The online mag says Featurewell.com's sales are about $200,000 a year, and CEO David Wallis projects they will hit $1 million by the syndicate's fifth year.
In 1956, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover created the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to infiltrate and cripple extremist political groups, such as the Black Panthers and other African-American political groups. In the Cleveland Free Times, Daniel Gray-Kontar looks at the renewed crackdown on African-American street organizations across the nation in the post Sept. 11 world and finds that many black leaders feel the new Patriot Act is the infamous COINTELRPO with a different name.
E&P's Lucia Moses looks at a batch of new daily-owned youth market publications in the works, from Gannett in Lansing, Mich., and Boise, Idaho, and from the Tribune Co., in Chicago and on Long Island. Reaching young readers is a delicate art, as alternative weeklies can attest. "The 'new generation' is newly minted every year," Chicago Newcity President Brian Hieggelke tells E&P. "Those of us who are writing about them ... the older we get, the less we should trust our instincts."
