8/28/04
During the editorship of Wayne Laugesen in Boulder Weekly's recent past, the prevailing style was a kind of anti-governmental ecumenism and Crisis-of-the-Week muckraking. It wasn't easy to tell if BW was Left or Right of -brain or -wing; therein paeans to machine-gun toting Tim McVeigh groupies shared space with such more typically New Left obsessions as globalization and NAFTA.
Eventually, progressive publisher Stewart Sallo had an allergic reaction to Laugesen's incorrigible pro-gun, anti-abortion contrarianism, and Laugesen abruptly vanished. In a surprise move in November, 2001, Publisher Stewart Sallo stopped accepting "adult" display ads, a move that can only have increased the paper's credibility in a town that, for all its almost religious veneration and broad misunderstanding of the First Amendment, could be rated PG. This can only have been a serious revenue hit.
Under former Colorado Daily editor, former managing editor of BW, and romance novelist Pam White, the Weekly has settled down into a kinder, gentler alternative newsweekly mold, increasing its coverage of the alternative health-spirituality stuff, Swamis 'n' Things, that fascinate Boulderians so much, and in this sense, moving a little closer to the "mainstream" Daily Camera. It has lost much of the the wild-eyed charm of the Laugesen Era. We don't have BW to pick on anymore.
BW hardly seems aware of the university, Ms White's former fiefdom, and doesn't really cover much local news. Consequently, it can seem curiously detached from Boulder at times.
Boulder Weekly is distrubed free throughout Greater Boulderia.
Closest the Weekly comes to humor: Withering Scorn.
The weekly column "People's Republic" (though it has turned increasingly "serious" of late) and the syndicated comic "This Modern World" is a plus.