Laura Miller, new mayor of Dallas, is the third politician with a strong connection to the alternative newspaper business since November to become mayor of a major American city. "There is definitely a trend in urban politics to be more progressive,” says John Rowley of the national political consulting firm Fletcher & Rowley in Nashville, Tenn. This shift makes urban voters “more receptive to the kinds of issues alt-weeklies like to belabor,” Matt Pulle writes for AAN News.
"Finally, a newspaper war," writes Carlos Santos in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "Journalistic headbutting. A scramble for ads. Recruiting skirmishes. It's a grudge match to boot. Start the presses. Since earlier this month, two hip, breezy, irreverent, free weekly alternative newspapers have been locked in a bitter battle for advertising dollars and readers in a small market likely to sustain only one." In this corner, AAN-member C*Ville Weekly, and in the opposite corner, The Hook, launched by C*Ville's co-founder and former editor, Hawes Spencer.
National advertising in alternative weeklies nosedived the first few weeks of 2002. "We're kind of on a shoestring now, but that's how we started," says AWN Executive Director Mark Hanzlik. At least one AAN paper is pulling out the stops to shore up the local ad base: Chicago Reader has restructured its ad rates so that some advertisers now are paying 15 percent less.
Scott Ware, editor of The Sun of Bremerton, Wash., recalls his days marathoning with Ken Neill, publisher of the Memphis Flyer. Neill recently underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery, and now Ware is running again and watching the biscuits. "Now, let's start thinking about running the Dublin again — even if this time, it's only the 10K," Ware concludes.
Sometime this fall, a group of the most influential black lawyers in the country -- including Harvard's Charles Ogletree and O.J. Simpson's attorney Johnnie Cochran -- are expected to walk into a federal courthouse and file suit against the people of the United States. The Hartford Advocate's Alistair Highet looks at the arguments for and against reparations. "What the lawsuit will say is a matter of conjecture, but it is expected to go like this: From 1619 until 1865, the white people of this country enslaved more than four million people of African descent who were bought and sold in this continent like farm animals. The white people of the country made a lot of money from them. Now the descendants of these Africans want some of that money back," he writes.
