Steve Perry, a former editor of City Pages (Twin Cities), will return to his old job, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Perry has been writing for The Rake, a new monthly started by Tom Bartel, brother of City Pages Publisher Mark Bartel. Perry replaces Tom Finkel, who was fired in July. Perry is the second former editor restored at a Village Voice Media paper this week, following Skip Berger's return to Seattle Weekly.
From a rebellious underground paper in the '60s, The Georgia Straight has grown to a 120,000 weekly circulation institution in Vancouver, B.C. It hasn't gotten that way by resting on its hippie laurels. Publisher Dan McLeod demonstrates that by once again shaking up his sales department, firing a vice president and parting ways with the consultant who helped double the paper's sales. "There's going to be some loud howling, but it's a way to grow the business," McLeod tells AAN News.
"Immediately after Sept. 11 the United States media went into lapdog mode," A.C. Thompson writes in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Announcing this year's top 10 most censored stories from Project Censored, the Guardian praises those reporters and publications that never stopped asking the hard questions or writing the disturbing stories.
San Diego CityBEAT published its inaugural issue last Wednesday, and the daily responds, "Bring it on." David L. Coddon writing in The San Diego Union-Tribune's weekly arts and entertainment guide, "Night & Day," says the new alt-weekly is trying to get a jump on both the daily and its 30-year-old alternative newsweekly rival, San Diego Reader, by publishing a day earlier. "Another 'voice' in local print media isn't bad," Coddon says.
Danny Bakewell's libel suit against New Times Los Angeles' columnists Rick Barrs (also the paper's editor) and Jill Stewart backfired. Stewart calls Bakewell "a multimillionaire developer and obnoxious black nationalist," as well as a "poverty pimp" for using money collected by the Brotherhood Crusade, ostensibly a charity, for his personal enrichment. The judge saw nothing wrong with using this term to describe Bakewell and ordered him to pay $25,000 to the alternative newsweekly.
Pittsburgh City Paper has hired Brentin Mock, a graduate of the Academy for Alternative Journalism at Medill. Each summer 10 minority journalism students go through the eight-week residential program, learning long-form feature writing with the alt-edge. Mike Lenehan, executive editor of the Chicago Reader and one of the founders of the Academy, says right now he's happy if one or two of its graduates are snapped up by alts. In the meantime, the Academy, which is funded by grants from AAN and its publishers, is building "a small army of future writers," Lenehan says.
Dan Perkins, who pens the cartoon "This Modern World" as Tom Tomorrow, says he and Michael Moore are teaming up on an animated feature film. "It will be a fictional, satirical narrative film, the look of which will be based on my work," Perkins says in a news release. He and Moore have been working on the screenplay since last October and expect to start pre-production in a few months.
