Alt-weeklies get some pretty weird-looking mail–highly creative promotional items, letters scrawled on brown paper and the like. These days many editors and publishers say their staff are opening all the mail with latex gloves and locking doors they used to leave open. One editor bucks the trend by organizing a charter trip to New York, and a publisher quips, “We've notified the local TV stations that we're ironing all our mail while wearing Tyvek suits, and invited them to come and film the process.”
Attorney General John Ashcroft now demands the very federal powers he opposed as a Missouri senator, Ray Hartmann points out in the Riverfront Times. "As for today's Ashcroft, whatever happened to the Fourth Amendment and the 'indivisible American value' it contains? To borrow a phrase (his), 'apparently innocent citizens are expected to trust the bureaucracy not to abuse them.'" For Ashcroft, that was then, Hartmann writes.
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.
