Milquetoast Xpress sends up Asheville’s independent weekly

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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David Conner Jones, an Asheville musician and frequent critic of Asheville’s independent news weekly, the Mountain Xpress, has launched an online parody of the newspaper. He calls it Milquetoast Xpress. With razor wit, Jones spears Xpress‘ coverage of local issues, its use of Twitter and its reporters.

From Milquetoast Xpress:

Milquetoast Xpress Mission:

To build community and strengthen democracy by serving an active, thoughtful readership at the local level – where the impact of citizen action is deemed greatest when that citizen has been dumbed down by absolutely mind-numbing writing week after week after week after week.

• We report independently, fairly and in-depth on local news and issues affecting Asheville and the surrounding region – as long as it doesn’t interfere with ad revenue, overdeveloping downtown, poor city planning, city and county graft, or whatever we whimsically decide the local status quo should be thinking about each week.

• We chronicle the area’s vibrant arts-and-culture scene in a so-so fashion to the best of our ability – ad infinitum – to a fault.

• We treat our readers as participants in an ongoing civic dialogue – unless they get uppity and criticize the repeated failures of one of our senior-junior journalists – or go “off topic” and start trying to steer a trivial and meandering discussion on one of our comment blogs toward a local matter that actually matters.

• Despite being the most whitebread regional paper in the southeast, we strive to honor diversity – even though we sometimes suspect diversity is being increasingly squelched with each passing day due to our greater culture’s homogenous, predictable, lobotomizing media coverage of a limited number of topics and events. We even sometimes suspect, in an off moment, that we are unwittingly participating in this process at the local level. Then the ADD kicks back in and we are once again lost in the ether. (But what the hay? Can’t lick em, join em!)

In a post on Milquetoast Xpress‘ page on Facebook, Jones says that if he gets enough followers, he’ll consider putting the online-only parody into print.