Creative Loafing Inc., which owns eponymous alt-weeklies in Tampa, Atlanta, Sarasota, and Charlotte, as well as the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 29. CEO Ben Eason assured employees that the move will leave editorial budgets and staffs intact, and it looks like all six titles are planning to continue publishing in print, though editors are being encouraged to pursue "web-first" strategies. 

“I’m filing [bankruptcy] because the economy sucks,” said Eason, whose parents founded Creative Loafing Atlanta in 1972. He told employees that the "safe harbor" of Chapter 11 would allow the company to work out a solid online advertising strategy and reorder its finances.

“This isn’t a failing company,” Eason wrote in an email to his newspapers’ executives, “but instead one caught squarely by this challenging economy between old media and new media.”

It’s a familiar story—a much-loved alt-weekly buckles under money troubles—but this time it’s happening overseas, with complex political ramifications. The eXile, a sassy English-language biweekly newspaper published for expats in Moscow, has ceased publication; the St. Petersburg Times reports that the paper's investors were spooked after officials from Russia's media bureau paid a visit to the eXile office, announcing plans to inspect the paper's archives for “extremist” content.

At the eXile’s website you can browse the archives, while they still exist, to sample some of the irreverent writing that earned the paper so many friends (and enemies) over the past eleven years, leavening puerile humor with incisive analysis of Russia’s fraught political system. (The cover of the final issue sums up the paper's mission succinctly and characteristically: “In a nation terrorized by its own government, one paper dared to fart in its face.”)

Mother Jones has already delivered a brief eulogy, eXile editor-in-chief Mark Ames is providing regular updates on the paper's fate at Radar, and eXile contributor Sean Guillory analyzes the reasons behind the shutdown on his blog. In the meantime, the eXile is accepting PayPal donations to move its servers to another, friendlier country: no more “.ru” at the end of the domain name; no more politically defiant coverage of Russia as seen through the eyes of Western émigrés.

Portland has been attracting as much hype as it has hippies, earning high rankings on a range of “Best Places to…” lists involving bikes, babies, beer, and general pleasantness. In Willamette Week, Zach Dundas digs into some recent media coverage of his fair northwestern city, rating articles from the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, and other sources on their ability to get the “Portland thing” right. It’s a fun piece, and I’m on board with Dundas’ suggestion that the glut of media attention has more to do with “reverse provincialism” than with Portland’s sudden awesomeness. From the fast-paced perspectives of New York and Los Angeles, he writes, "Portland's relative relaxation seems exotic." (We see a bit of this in national coverage of Minneapolis, though it often carries a more condescending “Wow, who knew that arts, culture, and food had found their way to the frozen north?!” vibe.) 

For the record, the Willamette Week staff’s ratings system—each article they discuss earns a score between 1 and 10, with penalties for transgressions like “Flagrant use of the word ‘grunge’ in a story about the Pacific Northwest”—doesn’t yield many high scores.

—Danielle Maestretti