The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist spoke with Brian Heater from the Daily Cross Hatch blog after a recent event celebrating the release of Explainers, a hardbound volume of the early Village Voice strips that first put Feiffer on the map. He talked about how hard it was to get his work published in the 1950s. "The political times were essentially not friendly to satire. This was just after Joe McCarthy, and there was still a very oppressive atmosphere, particularly in terms of what the media was and wasn't willing to print," Feiffer says. "The Voice, as it appeared, was the one independent newspaper that was likely to run me, if anyone was going to run me. If The Voice wasn't going to run me, I would have run out of choices and would have had to do something else with my life."

Continue ReadingJules Feiffer: ‘I Wouldn’t Have Been a Cartoonist’ Without the Voice

That's according to Variety, which reports in its inimitable varietyese that "The Weekly" is a "single-camera workplace comedy ... set in the office of a dishy alternative weekly publication and blog." Huh? Furthermore, "project is penned" by the impossibly named Flint Wainess, according to The Bible of the Entertainment Industry.

Continue ReadingSitcom About Alt-Weekly ‘Percolating in the Script Stage’ at ABC

The paper formerly known as The Weekly Planet signed a distribution deal this week with the St. Petersburg Times, according to the Tampa Bay Business Journal. The Business Journal also reports that publisher Sharry Smith "assured the staff that protection clauses were added to the agreement to keep Creative Loafing stories confidential until the actual release date." Although the Business Journal says the agreement "cost 19 people jobs," Smith tells AAN only one staff person was laid off.

Continue ReadingLocal Daily to Distribute Creative Loafing Tampa
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AAN's first conference for publishers will be held Oct. 31-Nov. 1 at the La Posada de Santa Fe Resort & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The small, informal conference will emphasize conversation and idea sharing, but there also will be several speakers addressing big-picture publishing issues and business trends. Registration will be capped at 40, and will be limited to one publisher or senior manager from each member paper, or two partner-owners from the same paper.

Continue ReadingRegistration Opens for Publishers Conference

After 16 years, Cleveland's oldest AAN member published its last issue today. Started by labor lawyer Richard Siegel in 1992, the alt-weekly survived even after its founder died a year later, always striving to remain faithful to his mission of providing "tough-minded, responsible and gutsy coverage of what's really going on in" Cleveland. Although Free Times survived a temporary shutdown in 2002-03, this time it appears to be closing for good. In its final issue, the paper publishes a series of tributes, remembrances, and critiques.

Continue ReadingCleveland Free Times, RIP

The English-language alt-biweekly for Moscow's expat community was born anew this week as a webzine called The eXiled. "(O)ur job isn't done," says editor Mark Ames, who claims to have moved the publication's operations to Panama. "We've got a lot of bile yet to be pumped, a lot of unfinished business -- and thanks to our readers, we've got a little pot of money to fuel our insurgency against what we can only describe as 'the fucks.'" According to Ames, The eXile was closed last month when its investors pulled out and its editors fled the country after Russian authorities arrived at the paper's office and announced an "unplanned audit" of its editorial content.

Continue ReadingRussia’s ‘The eXile’ Returns

CJR asked several cartoonists to offer their two cents on the controversial cover, including Ruben Bolling ("Tom the Dancing Bug"), Derf ("The City"), Matt Bors ("The Idiot Box") and Keith Knight ("The K Chronicles"). The responses vary, with Derf staking out the most uncompromising position: "I thought it was hilarious," says Cleveland's edgiest and tallest cartoonist. "So many people are misinformed, and you can't draw to the morons of America. If you don't know that Obama isn't a Muslim, we can't help you."

Continue ReadingAlt-Weekly Cartoonists Respond to The New Yorker’s Obama Cover

So says Washington Post critic Patrick Anderson, who describes ex-Omaha Weekly (now Omaha Reader) news editor Jonathan Segura's "Occupational Hazards" as "a savagely funny first novel" that tells a "dungeon-dark tale of low-rent journalism, political corruption and rampant degeneracy in a hellish Omaha." According to Anderson, Segura joins ex-Philadelphia City Paper editor Duane Swierczynski as mystery writers whose work is part of a new trend in the publishing business of releasing offbeat novels direct to paperback.

Continue ReadingFormer Altie Writes Book for the “Young, Hip, Cynical and Degenerate”