This past Monday, the Editorial Staff here at Um–like, we’re gonna guess, those of most of the rest of our…more professional colleagues– was market watching. Waiting, not unlike our pal Eliot (whose Facebook status message, we’d like to point out, hides little in the way of the glee we’re pretty sure that all 15 of the remaining for-real Marxists are feeling right about now) for the economy to fall apart. Hoping, not unlike–again, we’re gonna guess–most of our fellow media vultures (and, probably our pal Eliot) for some kinda, scroll-dominating, honest-to-god-breaking-news-graphic-worthy collapse that would, sure, totally wreck our world, but also provide us with a bit of entertaining ridiculousness.
Then, just before the Dow tanked, we found ourselves briefly distracted by a smaller financial mess. For those of you not inclined to click, that up there would be a link to a story posted by Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple on that paper’s web site. And it starts like this:
“Creative Loafing Inc., the owner of Washington City Paper, announced this morning that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.”
Hmmm…We here at Um are left to wonder whether maybe our headlines can predict the future.
In any case, CP’s subsequent coverage of all this seems to run a bit toward the HA-HA, or at least as HA-HA as a publication can be after their parent company has gone all belly-up (which, with good reason, is still pretty HA-HA): Still, reporter Angela Valdez has a pretty nice run-down of just how crazy the whole thing (greenbacks aside) is.
For those of you interested in a less…well, HA-HA take on things, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies has pulled together a fairly wide cut of coverage right about here.
Read it and–if yr at all like the Editorial Staff Here at Um–weep (for, like, you know, the AltWeekly industry).
