Auto advertising has been a tough nut for alternative newsweeklies to crack. AAN News asks ad directors how they won over these conservative, set-in-their-ways auto dealerships. Some say they're getting this lucrative business with a combination of special sections and savvy sales reps. Auto dealers are opening up to the alternative weekly market, but they want familiar relationships and a lot of bang for their buck, they say.
Kathleen Wilson writes a New Year's confessional in The Stranger, rich with the hellish details of her years of binge drinking and blacking out and the equally hellish struggle to stay sober while still writing about music and hanging out in bars. "The next binge would be my last, of that I was sure. But I was worried about appearances. I was afraid of what people would say if I just up and disappeared for a few weeks and then came back all shiny and sober. Asshole," she writes..
In a complaint filed with the Oregon Attorney General, Portland Mercury Publisher Rob Crocker claims a Willamette Week ad rep offered one of his advertisers a special rate contingent on stopping advertising in the Mercury, the Portland Tribune reports. WW Publisher Richard Meeker tells Tribune that his newspaper does not have such policies and that the situation was merely "an isolated incident" and a mistake.
