This week’s edition of Westchester County Weekly will be its last as a separate publication. Beginning next week, it will be folded into its sister publication, Fairfield County Weekly. About 30,000 readers in Westchester County, N.Y., will get their own cover with the old nameplate, but the content of the two alternative newsweeklies will be identical. Fran Zankowski, CEO and group publisher of Advocate*Weekly Newspapers, tells the staff in a memo that they made a “valiant attempt” to save the paper, but it was just not profitable enough to stand alone.
Independent Weekly names David Madison editor. Madison is a native of Chapel Hill, N.C., and a veteran alt-weekly writer and editor. Publisher Sioux Watson says the only person happier about the hire than the Indy staff is Madison’s mama, who is glad her boy is coming home.
"Being ahead was a lot less complicated than being alone," Andy Newman, editor of Pittsburgh City Paper, tells the Pittsburgh Business Times. The staff plans to meet this week to redesign and remake City Paper after its parent company bought rival newsweekly In Pittsburgh last month and closed it. City Paper has since then absorbed a number of former In Pittsburgh employees. Newman says he would rather "drive carpet staples" into his gums than conduct a focus group, but admits he's asked some other journalists for input on the new design.
Former St. Petersburg Times staffers are set to launch St. Pete Weekly, an alternative paper that's due to hit the streets Nov. 7. Although the well-entrenched Weekly Planet also publishes in the Tampa Bay area, Publisher Dean Capone says there's plenty of room for another alternative.
Newspaper companies in the District of Columbia, including Washington City Paper, reached a voluntary agreement with downtown business officials on newsracks. Under the agreement, publishers will use demonstration sites to test three different rack systems to see which one works best.
A couple of weeks ago Lee Enterprise's daily paper in Missoula changed the publication day of its weekend section and started to distribute it as a free, stand-alone paper. In a publisher's note, Missoula Independent's Matt Gibson says the move is "a transparent attempt by the Missoulian to impede the growth" of his paper, and calls it unethical, anti-competitive and "probably illegal". He promises that Lee is "going to find themselves in a fight so fierce and unrelenting, they’ll wish they’d picked on somebody their own size."
