Tom Walsh, editor of the Sacramento News & Review, remembers his time in Afghanistan, when another war was raging. "I remember looking at the Toyota long-bed truck and wondering if this would be where I would die," Walsh writes. Obviously he survived, but others did not come back from the war against the Soviets. One of them was Jim Lindelof, who wrote: “I know this trip is crazy, but for the pictures and the story we’re after, it’s worth the risk; that is, as long as we don’t get killed.” Lindelof was killed on his way out of Afghanistan with what he believed was the first-ever film of a CIA-supplied Stinger missile knocking a Soviet fighter jet out of the sky. His film was never found. Now Walsh sees the journalists pouring back into Afghanistan and wonders if that country will ever know peace.
Cincinnati CityBeat has purchased a six-story downtown building and is now looking for "like-minded" tenants to share the space, the Cincinnati Business Courier reports. CityBeat will pay $790,000 for the building where Hank Williams once recorded. "We just thought it would be better to buy. It was a good deal. It's a really good building, and we wanted to stay downtown," Co-Publisher and Editor John Fox tells the business paper.
Utne Reader has nominated eight AAN members in its 13th Annual Alternative Press Awards. Nashville Scene is nominated for Political Reporting. Colorado Springs Independent, LA Weekly, The Local Planet Weekly, Metro Times (Detroit), NOW (Toronto) and The Texas Observer were all nominated for Best Local Coverage. The Village Voice was nominated for Arts and Literature.
Renee Downing, the next to the last of Ed Abbey’s five ex-wives, reviews the new biography of Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and other novels. “Women who slept with Ed Abbey constitute a sizable, although aging, female sub-population in the Southwestern United States, and [James] Cahalan, a tireless researcher, seems to have talked with most of them,” Downing writes. Cahalan didn’t talk to her, though, for his Edward Abbey: A Life. This is her first word on the subject, published in Tucson Weekly.
Howard Witt has resigned as editor of Washington City Paper, effective Nov. 16. “Please join me in congratulating Howard,” Jane Levine, publisher of City Paper's parent Chicago Reader Inc., says in a memo to staff. "The search will take as long as it takes to find a good editor," Levine says. Meanwhile, Associate Editor Richard Byrne has been named interim editor. MORE: The Washington Post reports Friday morning that Witt is leaving to take a job covering the State Department for the Chicago Tribune.
CityLife, a non-AAN weekly in Las Vegas, said nasty things about the MGM Mirage big boys in a story. The giant casino responded by pulling its ads at a particularly bad time for the company, the Las Vegas Sun reports. "They're not worthy of us," an MGM spokesman tells the Sun.
