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."
Lisa Chamberlain, editor of Cleveland Free Times, tells JournalismJobs.com that alt weeklies thrive because mainstream media is "so neutered, so buttoned down and so devoid of any personality that people simply cannot relate to it." She says alternative papers have "grown up without losing our edge" and calls alternative journalism "one of the last places left to do really in-depth, hard-hitting work."
A freelance writer for the Sacramento News & Review booked a round-trip flight from Sacramento International to LAX for a story on airport security. He stumbled into war-against-terrorism hell.
