AAN News
North Coast Journal Story on Weapons Permits Causes a Stir
The Humboldt County alt-weekly provoked an angry response last week with a cover story revealing the names of citizens who have permits to carry concealed weapons in the county. The cover illustration of a handgun was composed of names supplied by the county sheriff's office of 641 individuals holding such a permit. The story has caused an "internet shitstorm," editor Hank Sims tells AAN News, as evidenced by the comments on the story itself and various online forums and blogs. Sims notes that the reaction online has been much harsher than his face-to-face encounters. "A number of local people called or came into the office last week a little bit angry, wondering how we got their name or why we should be allowed to publish the list. They were all very cool, and I had some great conversations," he says. "These out-of-town internet dudes are another matter."
AAN News |
09-30-2008 10:44 am |
Industry News
Pro-Voting Public Service Ads Available for AAN Members
Portland-based ad agency Borders Perrin Norrander has created a campaign urging people to vote this fall and is offering the ads for AAN members to run between now and election day. Much like the presidential campaign, the ad campaign's theme is change, with the tag line "Don't Vote. Things Are Just Fine the Way They Are," paired with striking visual representations of some of the country's most pressing problems. Willamette Week publisher Richard Meeker says the agency is OK with AAN members turning to other advertisers to help sponsor the advertisements and perhaps get them more prominently placed within the paper. Meeker adds that WW is trying to secure ad dollars from MoveOn.org so they can run the Borders ads on full pages, rather than on a space-available basis. To view the ads, visit ThingsAreFine.org.
AAN News |
09-30-2008 9:51 am |
Industry News
Fast Forward Weekly Story Provokes Response from Prime Minister
Fast Forward Weekly, the alt-weekly in Calgary, Canada, published a story Sept. 25 that quoted a Calgary Member of Parliament making comments linking immigrants to crime in the middle of an election campaign. Lee Richardson made the comments in a telephone interview with the paper, and as soon as the story was published, it was picked up in the local and national media. The following day, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper dismissed the story as a ridiculous example of "gotcha journalism" -- even though the paper had phoned Richardson after the initial interview to ask him to clarify his remarks. (Richardson's retraction was included in the Fast Forward story.) The story even warrented a mention on Comedy Central's election blog.
AAN News |
09-26-2008 5:28 pm |
Industry News
Pasadena Weekly Contributor Co-Authors Humor Book
The satirical advice book that Weekly writer Carl Kozlowski wrote with Chicago-based standup comic Tim Joyce was actually originally published in August 2001. Back then, it was titled Life: The Final Frontier, and it was gaining steam as the authors made the press rounds to promote it, according to Kozlowski. Then came 9/11, and "book companies panicked and dumped on writers like us," he tells AAN News. The duo stuck with it, though, determined to have their book be a success. They wrote about 80 new pages of material on life amidst the war on terror and created a new version of the book, Seize the Day Job! The Humor Book Al Qaeda Kept You From Reading, which was released this May. For more, visit Kozlowski's website.
AAN News |
09-24-2008 1:24 pm |
Industry News
Tags: Editorial, Pasadena Weekly
Gambit Weekly Food Columnist Pens Katrina Memoir
Ian McNulty's A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina "certainly ranks as one of the better Katrina memoirs," according to John Sledge, a columnist for the Alabama daily Press-Register. "McNulty's approach is defiantly, if quietly, personal," notes Gambit Weekly's Caroline Goyette. "It's this tight focus, combined with the author's fine eye for detail and his honest, introspective narration, that gives the book its considerable power."
AAN News |
09-22-2008 12:55 pm |
Industry News
New Tom Tomorrow Book is Out
The cartoonist behind "This Modern World" says on his blog that his new compilation, The Future's So Bright I Can't Bear to Look, is now in stock at Amazon.com. The book, which he calls "a cartoon chronicle of the end of the Bush era," is officially set for release Sept. 29 by Nation Books.
AAN News |
09-19-2008 8:24 am |
Industry News
Tags: Tom Tomorrow
2008 'How I Got That Story' Series Begins Today
After a two-year hiatus, the "How I Got That Story" series today returns to AAN.org to help shed light on the processes employed by first-place AltWeekly Award winners. This year, 19 winners were interviewed by Academy for Alternative Journalism fellows, and each week, two new interviews will be published on AAN.org. These interviews will also appear in the book Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2008, which will be available soon. To read the first installment of the series, Rich Knight's interview with Washington City Paper art critic Jeffry Cudlin, click here.
AAN News |
09-18-2008 1:17 pm |
Association News
Ted Rall Elected President of Editorial Cartoonists Group
Rall, whose cartoons and columns appear in many alt-weeklies, took over as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists on Sept. 12. "For some reason my colleagues have made me president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), the organization for professional political cartoonists. (I suspect cartoonists' predilection for hard drinking had something to do with it.)," Rall writes in his weekly column. "Kidding aside, I'm honored." V. Cullum Rogers, the cartoonist at North Carolina's Independent Weekly, remains the group's secretary-treasurer, and Mikhaela Reid, whose work appears in Metro Times and other AAN papers, was elected to the group's board of directors.
AAN News |
09-17-2008 9:28 am |
Industry News
Four New Alt-Weekly-Related Books Hit the Shelves
OC Weekly staff writer and ¡Ask a Mexican! columnist Gustavo Arellano's second book is due to be released on Sept. 16. Orange County: A Personal History is a memoir that examines the history of Orange County as seen through four generations of his family moving back and forth between Mexico and Anaheim. Ed Zotti, longtime editor of the syndicated Straight Dope column, also has a new memoir, which was released this week. His The Barn House: Confessions of an Urban Rehabber is a "memoir about fixing up an old house in the city and pursuing the urban version of the American Dream." Check out an excerpt on the Chicago Reader's site. Another memoir on the horizon is Prince Joe Henry's Princoirs. Henry is the longtime author of the "Ask a Negro Leaguer" column in the Riverfront Times, and the book is an extension of the column. If you're not into memoirs, some of Seattle Weekly cartoonist Scott Meyer's "Basic Instructions" comic strips have been collected in the new Help Is on the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions, which was released this week.
AAN News |
09-05-2008 8:08 am |
Industry News
Gambit Weekly is Back in Business
After distributing this week's issue one day early, on Saturday, so readers fleeing Hurricane Gustav could grab a copy on their way out of town, about half of Gambit's staff are back in the office today, publisher Margo DuBos tells AAN News. The entire staff of 35 are expected back tomorrow. Much of New Orleans is still without power, but Gambit is running on a generator purchased after Katrina, furiously working on next week's issue, which will see the light of day on Monday, just one day after the paper's unusual Sunday street date. The alt-weekly also kept a steady pace of blogging over at the Blog of New Orleans before, during, and after the storm.
AAN News |
09-04-2008 1:40 pm |
Industry News
Outgoing Editor-in-Chief's Farewell Email to Worcester Magazine Staff
AAN News |
08-28-2008 12:48 pm |
Industry News
Scores of AANies Head to Denver for the DNC
At last count, 24 AAN member papers will be sending 40 reporters, bloggers and photographers to Denver to cover this year's historic Democratic National Convention, which begins Monday. There will be plenty of alt-weekly staffers attending, and a few papers have secured notable bloggers for their coverage. Popular political blogger Atrios, aka Dr. Duncan Black, who runs Eschaton, will blog for Philadelphia City Paper, while "Slowpoke" cartoonist Jen Sorensen will blog for C-Ville Weekly and Tom Tomorrow will blog for the New Mass. Media papers. Westword, meanwhile, has published a special "Unconventional Guide to Denver" for all the press, pundits, and pols invading their city. And of course, Westword will continue to cover the DNC on its Demver blog, as it has been for months, with a dozen or so people on the ground blogging and taking pictures. For a list of AAN members attending the DNC, email web (at) aan.org.
AAN News |
08-22-2008 1:01 pm |
Industry News
Fairfield County Weekly Parts Ways With Editor
AAN News has learned that Tom Gogola is no longer the editor of the Tribune Company's AAN-member paper in suburban Connecticut. No replacement has been named. Associate editor Nick Keppler has temporarily assumed the editorial reins, according to Josh Mamis, group publisher for the Weekly and the three other New Mass. Media papers.
AAN News |
08-06-2008 1:27 pm |
Industry News
Earthquake Hits Southern California, Alt-Weekly Offices Feel It
A little before noon yesterday, a 5.4 magnitude earthquake hit Southern California, with an epicenter 29 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, according to the US Geological Survey. The quake, which was the largest in SoCal in more than a decade but apparently caused no major damage, was felt in AAN-member offices from San Diego to Santa Barbara, judging by a quick perusal of blogs. "[It] felt like I was standing on a rocking waterbed for at least 12 seconds. The building swayed back and forth. A large corkboard fell off my office wall," the OC Weekly's R. Scott Moxley reports. "An energy drink can stupidly placed (by me) on top of a file cabinet flew three feet in the air. The staff quickly evacuated the building and found phone lines dead." Up in Culver City at LA Weekly's offices, Mark Mauer notes: "The new LA Weekly building shakes like a leaf (at least around my desk) every time a car enters or leaves our garage, so it took a few extra seconds to figure out this was an actual earthquake and not just an SUV trying to find a parking space." The Santa Barbara Independent's Matt Kettman reports feeling a "long, rolling sensation," while San Diego CityBeat's Kinsee Morgan wins the award for brevity, simply noting the quake was the "biggest one I've felt yet."
AAN News |
07-30-2008 8:30 am |
Industry News
AAN Board Member Gets Married by East Bay Express
The Santa Barbara Independent's Robby Robbins, who is AAN's Classified Advertising Chair, was married on July 2 to longtime partner Bryan O'Quinn as part of the Express' Wedding Wednesdays promotion. The paper chose six couples to be married to celebrate same-sex couples' newfound right to legally marry in California. In attendance at the July 2 ceremony were a number of Independent staffers who drove up from Santa Barbara, as well as Gloria Mock, advertising director of North Carolina's Independent Weekly, where Robbins previously worked. "Bryan and I are so grateful to the East Bay Express, [publisher] Jody Colley, and all
their partners/vendors for making this wonderful time more spectacular than
we could ever have imagined," Robbins tells AAN News via email. For more photos click here, and for a video montage of all six weddings, click here.
AAN News |
07-22-2008 1:38 pm |
Industry News
