The Portland Mercury just turned two, and its editor may sometimes act like a terrible two, Joseph Gallivan writes in the Portland Tribune. William Steven Humphrey's antics range from flinging gunpowder "snaps" around the room to performing obscene acts with the doorknobs at rival Willamette Week, Gallivan writes. "He's mature, and he's a little boy and he's a disgusting pervert all at once," Dan Savage tells Gallivan. "I admire how a fortysomething can use the word 'pee-pee' as much as he does," Mark Zusman, editor of Willamette Week, says.
A new wave of refugees in Baltimore could revitalize its struggling neighborhoods, Nicole Leistikow writes in Baltimore City Paper. Leistikow, who has volunteered for the International Rescue Committee, says an afternoon on a Baltimore street corner can show a "woman in flowing robes carrying groceries on her head; friends stopping on the sidewalk to chat in African-accented French; too-cool European teenagers trying to win an argument with their parents in Serbo-Croatian." Scenes like this are becoming familiar not only in major American cities. Even smaller towns are trying to attract immigrant energy.
“This book, I hope, is a book of encounters, none of them predictable,” novelist and music writer Jonathan Lethem writes in his introduction to “Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002.” Seven of the 28 articles in the collection were originally published in alternative newsweeklies, including The Village Voice, Chicago Reader and City Pages (Twin Cities).
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.
