It’s worth visiting www.bentobox.net if only to see its beautifully muted and supremely animated splash page. This is the site of Bento Box Media (800—555 West Hastings Street, Downtown, 604-443-5077), an east-meets-west kind of post-production and Internet-related business. It comes well recommended by the Georgia Straight for its offbeat branding, print jobs, Web sites, and “interactive design.”
The Georgia straight (604-730-7000, www.straight.com), a longtime free-distribution weekly paper, remains without question at the top of the heap of Vancouver’s so-called community or urban papers. If holding a paper so well endowed with advertising doesn’t tire your arms, you’ll find much of interest. The abundance of advertising, coupled with respect for editorial, means the paper pays decently enough to attract good freelancers.
The Straight leans heavily to entertainment. It is particularly strong on the alternative music, club, film, and theater scenes, although even the so-called serious arts get decent treatment. Eating and cooking (in and out), clothing and related vanities, books, the outdoors, travel — and distinctly left-leaning politics — are all here. The paper hits business foyers, public facilities such as libraries, and sidewalk boxes on Thursdays.
The thrice-weekly Vancouver Courier has been around for eons, delivering in-depth coverage of civic politics and neighborhood dis¬putes. For all-out in-your-face reading, pick up the weekly terminal city. Discorder, distributed by UBC student radio station CITR, covers the alternative music and arts scene, culture in general, and politics. (The West Ender, another long-timer, I’ll place in the “Sex Shops ” page.)
Broadcasting from the depths of the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver Cooperative Radio (better known as Co-op Radio), at 102.7 FM, remains a strong non-commercial voice and well-loved source of off the-map music and comment — social, political, and otherwise.
Unbeknownst to many people, Vancouver has no fewer than three Chinese-language daily newspapers — all owned in Asia, but printed here, with some overseas wire copy. Sing Tao and Ming Pao are read by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking Chinese, and have large, local editorial staffs. The WorldJournal is published for the local Taiwanese population. If you’re after an insider’s view of life for the young,
chic Asian-Canadian, pick up a copy of Banana magazine, produced by twentysomethings in Chinatown.
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