Washington City Paper recently saved $8,000 by dropping all of its syndicated comics, the Chicago Reader's Michael Miner reports. City Paper still carries one local strip, "Dirtfarm," only because author Ben Claassen lets the paper run it for free. "City Paper feels like family to me," Claassen tells Miner by way of explanation. But Lynda Barry, who quit her "Ernie Pook's Comeek" strip, and her friend Matt Groening are feeling less familial these days about their former alt-weekly clients. Nevertheless, Groening keeps plugging away, creating "Life in Hell" every week even though his success with The Simpsons has left him financially secure. "I like sitting down once a week and knocking something out all by myself," says Groening. "The rest of my life is full of collaborators."
Takes one to know one? Maybe not. Despite New Times' propensity to publish the occasional tall tale, staff writer Niki D'Andrea admits that this time the paper fell victim to another publication's spoof. In a lengthy cover story about the tattoos of Phoenix Suns basketball players, D'Andrea credulously reported that NBA Commissioner David Stern was proposing a "tattoo cap" limiting each team's "roster as a whole to 61 percent tattoo coverage of the 'upper arms and necks.'" D'Andrea says she picked the story up from Foxsports.com, which posted an item originally published on a blog called the Gerbil Sports Network. Bloggers Alana G, who first caught New Times' mistake, and Heat City, weigh in on the incident.
In the North Carolina Press Association's annual contest, the Independent Weekly won a total of nine awards and Mountain Xpress took home three. The Indy finished first in three categories: criticism (which it swept), investigative reporting and news coverage. The Xpress finished first in the Special Section category. In addition, the Indy collected five awards, including one first-place win, in the the North Carolina Press Photographers Association's annual contest.
"I've been privileged to enjoy the alt-weekly journalist's brief of reporting and writing lengthy articles on the various topics, from the serious to the fanciful, appealing to the wide-ranging interests of Rhode Islanders," writes Ian Donnis. He is leaving the alt-weekly to become public radio station WRNI's political reporter.
Though 63 percent of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82 percent use search engines to do so, only 44 percent of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10 percent of their marketing budget online, according to new research from Webvisible and Nielsen.
A judge in Texas has ordered the site Topix to reveal identifying information about 178 anonymous commenters who allegedly defamed Mark and Rhonda Lesher. The couple was indicted and later acquitted for sexual assault, but in the nine months that the criminal case was pending, people posted more than 25,000 comments to Topix message boards about the charges, some of which were defamatory, according to the 365-page lawsuit.
Joe Lance, who wrote the "Civic Forum" political column for Chattanooga's The Pulse until early 2008, entered that Tennessee city's 2009 mayoral race back in November, but has since withdrawn and endorsed former Parks & Recreation director Rob Healy. Election officials tell the Chattanoogan that Lance's name will remain on the ballot because they didn't know he was giving up his run.
Ling Ma, a 2008 graduate of the Academy for Alternative Journalism, wrote this week's Chicago Reader cover story about the city's Museum of Holography and a controversial bank loan that may spell the museum's demise. The yearly academy trains young journalists in long-form feature writing with the aim of recruiting them into the alternative press. MORE: Read Ma's blog about reporting the story here.
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