Ken Stocker comes from Denver's Westword to the Riverfront Times, on a mission to raise public awareness of the alt-weekly and thereby boost sales. The 12-year New Times veteran has a green sales staff, but he's convinced the paper is "poised and ready to make a big push." He replaces Terry Coe, who resigned from the Riverfront Times after 17 years.
Cancer patients from California and around the world are seeking an alternative, holistic approach to building up the body and beating cancer. Dr. Douglas Brodie has a thriving practice in Reno -- the new destination of choice for many thousands of cancer patients, from around the world, who seek alternative therapies for cancer and other diseases. Too bad it’s outlawed in California. Melinda Welsh looks at the reasons in Sacramento News & Review.
Tim Keck, publisher of The Stranger in Seattle, has a cash infusion from the Chicago Reader to turn up the heat on his competition. The Reader is now a minority shareholder in Index Newspapers LLC, a company formed early yesterday that now owns and operates The Stranger and The Portland Mercury in Portland, Ore. Keck’s first goal: increase circulation in both markets. “We’ve been bootstrapping it for 10 years,” Keck tells AAN News. “Now we are going to be aggressively growing the business.”
With President Bush's proposed marriage initiative, Uncle Sam turns matchmaker. But does government-sponsored marriage support actually work? Chisun Lee reports in The Village Voice on the politics behind the programs, and Sharon Lerner shows how they fall short of reducing poverty. Plus: profiles of five unmarried women -- potential "targets." The plan is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, "who derides 'the underclass' as criminal, oversexed, and lazy, makes a feint at remedying such 'dysfunctional behavior,'" Lee writes.
Started as a hell-raising environmental, liberal weekly in 1968, the venerable Maine Times published its last issue last week. Christopher Hutchins, the weekly's latest owner (a conservative), told the staff he was no longer willing to cover the paper's losses, Editor Jay Davis tells the Portland Press Herald. "The Maine Times that folded yesterday isn't the Maine Times that we started in 1968," said [John] Cole, who lives in Brunswick. "Readers no longer were absolutely sure what the Maine Times stood for," the Press Herald reports. The Maine Times, formerly an AAN-member paper, hosted the 1987 AAN convention.