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Russell Smith | |
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Born | Russ Smith 1955 (age 67–68) |
Occupation(s) | Newspaper publisher and columnist |
Known for | Founder of Baltimore City Paper , Washington City Paper and New York Press |
Relatives | Randall D. Smith (brother) |
Russ Smith (born 1955) is an American newspaper publisher and columnist best known for founding the Baltimore City Paper , Washington City Paper and New York Press .
After selling the Baltimore and Washington City Papers for $4 million, Smith founded New York Press in 1989. Like his previous papers, the press was an alternative weekly. It became a caustic rival with the well-established Village Voice .
In 2002 Avalon Equity Partners, publisher of a chain of gay alternative weeklies including the New York Blade and the Washington Blade , purchased the paper from Smith, although they continued to publish his 10,000+ word weekly column, MUGGER. From 2003 to 2006, Smith wrote a column called "Right Field" for the Baltimore City Paper.
A libertarian Republican [1] (he is an advocate of the legalization of prostitution, gambling, same-sex marriage, and currently illegal drugs), Smith is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, a position that he has held since 1999; he also writes for the paper's "Taste" section. Other publications Smith has written for include Baltimore's Press Box, The New York Sun , and Jewish World Review .
In March 2008, Smith founded the website Splice Today, which features a variety of authors including Crispin Sartwell, William Bryk, and Mark Judge. The site covers an eclectic range of topics, with particular emphasis on politics and the arts. Smith writes articles for the site regularly. These pieces are usually politics-centric or personal essays.
The Village Voice is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the Voice began as a platform for the creative community of New York City. It ceased publication in 2017, although its online archives remained accessible. After an ownership change, the Voice reappeared in print as a quarterly in April 2021.
The Washington Blade is an LGBT newspaper in the Washington metropolitan area. The Blade is the oldest LGBT newspaper in the United States and third largest by circulation, behind the Philadelphia Gay News and the Gay City News of New York City. The Blade is often referred to as America's gay newspaper of record because it chronicled LGBT news locally, nationally, and internationally. The New York Times said the Blade is considered "one of the most influential publications written for a gay audience."
The Baltimore Sun is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries.
The Houston Press is an online newspaper published in Houston, Texas, United States. It is headquartered in the Midtown area. It was also a weekly print newspaper until November 2017.
The Phoenix was the name of several alternative weekly periodicals published in the United States of America by Phoenix Media/Communications Group of Boston, Massachusetts, including the Portland Phoenix and the now-defunct Boston Phoenix, Providence Phoenix and Worcester Phoenix. These publications emphasized local arts and entertainment coverage as well as lifestyle and political coverage. The Portland Phoenix, which was published until 2023, is now owned by another company, New Portland Publishing.
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
The Courier Journal, also known as the Louisville Courier Journal (and informally The C-J or The Courier), and called The Courier-Journal between November 8, 1868, and October 29, 2017, is the highest circulation newspaper in Kentucky. It is owned by Gannett and billed as "Part of the USA Today Network". According to the 1999 Editor & Publisher International Yearbook, the paper is the 48th-largest daily paper in the United States.
Salt Lake City Weekly is a free alternative weekly tabloid-paged newspaper published in Salt Lake City, Utah. It began as Private Eye. City Weekly is published and dated for every Thursday by Copperfield Publishing Inc. of which John Saltas is majority owner and president.
The Chicago Reader, or Reader, is an American nonprofit alternative newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a group of friends from Carleton College.
An alternative newspaper is a type of newspaper that eschews comprehensive coverage of general news in favor of stylized reporting, opinionated reviews and columns, investigations into edgy topics and magazine-style feature stories highlighting local people and culture. Its news coverage is more locally focused, and their target audiences are younger than those of daily newspapers. Typically, alternative newspapers are published in tabloid format and printed on newsprint. Other names for such publications include alternative weekly, alternative newsweekly, and alt weekly, as the majority circulate on a weekly schedule.
The Los Angeles Free Press, also called the "Freep", is often cited as the first, and certainly was the largest, of the underground newspapers of the 1960s. The Freep was founded in 1964 by Art Kunkin, who served as its publisher until 1971 and continued on as its editor-in-chief through June 1973. The paper closed in 1978. It was unsuccessfully revived a number of times afterward.
The Baltimore News-American was a broadsheet newspaper published in downtown Baltimore, Maryland until May 27, 1986. It had a continuous lineage of more than 200 years. For much of the mid-20th century, it had the largest circulation in the city.
Village Voice Media or VVM is a newspaper company. It began in 1970 as a weekly alternative newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. The company, founded by Michael Lacey (editor) and Jim Larkin (publisher), was then known as New Times Inc. (NTI) and the publication was named New Times. The company was later renamed New Times Media.
The Pittsburgh City Paper is Pittsburgh's leading alternative weekly newspaper which focuses on local news, opinion, and arts and entertainment. It bought out In Pittsburgh Weekly in 2001. As of April 2015, City Paper is the 14th largest alternative weekly in the United States.
Baltimore City Paper was a free alternative weekly newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, founded in 1977 by Russ Smith and Alan Hirsch. The most recent owner was the Baltimore Sun Media Group, which purchased the paper in 2014 from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the newspaper since 1987. It was distributed on Wednesdays in distinctive yellow boxes found throughout the Baltimore area. The paper folded in 2017, due to the collapse of advertising revenue income to print media. The Media Group's closure announcement happened at the same meeting immediately after recognizing City Paper staff joining the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
The Real Paper was a Boston-area alternative weekly newspaper with a circulation in the tens of thousands. It ran from August 2, 1972, to June 18, 1981, often devoting space to counterculture and alternative politics of the early 1970s. The offices were in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
OC Weekly was a free alternative weekly paper distributed in Orange County and Long Beach, California. OC Weekly was founded in September 1995 by Will Swaim, who acted as editor and publisher until 2007.
The Baltimore Afro-American, commonly known as The Afro or Afro News, is a weekly African-American newspaper published in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the flagship newspaper of the AFRO-American chain and the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States, established in 1892.
The People's Voice, also known as Voice, was a newspaper based in Harlem, New York City to serve the African American community. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a New York politician and pastor, founded the newspaper in 1942. Voice mainly focused on racial issues, local events and investigative news, but it also covered entertainment and sports. Many activists and writers contributed to Voice, including Ann Petry, Fredi Washington, and Marvel Cooke. The paper stopped publication in 1948 partly due to accusations that Voice was circulating Communist propaganda.