"This art form that I fell in love with 20 years ago is on its hospital bed," Dan Perkins, aka Tom Tomorrow, tells Extra! in a piece on how the alt-weekly industry's struggles have affected alt-cartoonists. Other prominent cartoonists, like Lloyd Dangle, Jen Sorensen and Alison Bechdel, weigh in on losing clients, the digital transformation and what comes next. "We're a little like op-ed columnists; people wouldn't expect someone like Paul Krugman to sell T-shirts to survive and pay for his column," Sorensen says. "The idea that content should be free is definitely threatening our entire genre." MORE CARTOONING NEWS: Perkins talks to the New Haven Advocate about his new book, Pearl Jam and the "not so bright" future of his craft.

Continue ReadingAlt-Cartoonists Sound Off About the Changing Industry

Phoenix Media, the parent company of the Phoenix alt-weeklies in Boston, Portland and Providence, filed a lawsuit yesterday alleging that Facebook infringed on a patent held by the company's Tele-Publishing Inc. (TPI) division for publishing personal pages on online dating services. A Facebook spokesperson tells the Boston Globe the suit is "without merit," something Phoenix Media executive editor Peter Kadzis disputes. "The intellectual concepts that Facebook uses to give its users maximum flexibility of choice while maintaining the highest level of privacy replicate/duplicate those developed by TPI many years ago," he says. "It's not a frivolous suit."

Continue ReadingPhoenix Media Sues Facebook

In its quest to find a medical marijuana dispensary reviewer, the Denver alt-weekly is asking would-be critics to write a brief essay on "What Marijuana Means to Me." Editor Patricia Calhoun says that the national media attention has brought in quite a few applications -- "some silly, some actually spelled correctly (many potheads don't seem to care for punctuation), some very sincere."

Continue ReadingApplications for Westword Pot Critic Gig ‘Continue to Pour In’

"It is nice to have all the restaurants and attractions and souvenir shops down by the harbor," the intro to the paper's city guide reads. "But Baltimore is so much more, and knowing that -- and wanting to share that information with future visitors -- inspired the staff of City Paper, Baltimore's Free Alternative Weekly, to create this guide to our city." The "Baltimanual" is both a print product and a microsite that will be constantly updated with new content.

Continue ReadingBaltimore City Paper Launches ‘Baltimanual’ City Guide

The Ohio Society of Professional Journalists Awards have announced the winners of its 2009 awards contest. The Cleveland Scene won seven total awards, finishing first for Arts Profile, Media Criticsm, Newsmaker Profile, Public Service Journalism and Rock and Roll Feature Reporting. The Cleveland Free Times, which was merged with the Scene in July 2008, took home two awards, including a first-place win for Consumer Reporting, and The Other Paper of Columbus won five awards.

Continue ReadingOhio Alt-Weeklies Take Home 14 State Press Awards

The city of Cincinnati and a coalition of local religious and nonprofit leaders led by Citizens for Community Values (CCV) have settled a federal lawsuit filed last year by CityBeat after the groups and law enforcement leaders had publicly asked the paper to stop publishing adult-oriented classified ads. "After a long year of fighting for our First Amendment right to publish CityBeat without government interference, I'm pleased and gratified to wrap up the legal proceedings on such a positive note," co-publisher and editor John Fox writes. While he admits that fighting the suit was "distracting at times," Fox says there was a principle to uphold. "I remain convinced that standing up to the CCV coalition's threats and intimidation was the right thing to do," he writes. "After all, the only reason bullies do what they do is because they think they can get away with it."

Continue ReadingCoalition Settles Suit With Cincinnati CityBeat

"The project has been both the most benign undertaking of the year and the most important," Weekly editor Rachael Daigle writes, "as an industrywide slump forced staffing changes while we simultaneously rolled out a new website, inaugurated first-ever supplements, and then radically changed Best of Boise." She says "the new design represents a maturity" in the nearly-18-year-old alt-weekly.

Continue ReadingBoise Weekly Unveils Redesigned Print Product

At a debate held in a local bar over the weekend, Seattle mayoral candidates Mike McGinn and Joe Mallahan were given one minute to answer each question, with the option of being granted a time extension ... if they took a shot of whiskey. Weekly managing editor and debate co-moderator Mike Seely tells KING 5 News that the forum was designed to get the candidates to show off their personalities instead of relying on the usual sound bites, and also to bring the race to a new audience. "We figure we had a captive audience that had about no interest in politics, and we figured we'd force feed them politics," Seely says.

Continue ReadingSeattle Weekly’s Mayoral Debate Helps Candidates Reach New Audience