Brooklyn Paper/Courier-Life publish special section: "Brooklyn welcomes its new arena"

Both the Brooklyn Paper and its sibling Courier Life/Brooklyn Daily, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's Community Newspaper Group, offer a 24-page special section saluting the Barclays Center.

(I believe it's also in Murdoch's New York Post.)

Yes, there's a big ad from the arena, as well as from local businesses. Yes, there's a big ad from the arena in the regular issue of the weeklies, as well.

So it's not surprising that the content is celebratory:

• fun facts about the arena
• hopeful neighborhood businesses
• scheduled boxing matches
• the "Disney on Ice" show
• free tickets for neighborhood groups
• a photo gallery
• a lengthy arena events guide, day-by-day
• a (somewhat limited) neighborhood eats-and-drinks guide
• a sort-of history of the area (with a conflation of the site Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley sought with the arena site)

Flashback

Could you believe that the Brooklyn Paper published a 1/24/04 editorial by its founder, Ed Weintrob, headlined The real story is the land grab, not the Nets:

That the Nets are coming is beside the point. And that is the real story, a story masterfully buried by developer Bruce Ratner and his media shills. (When the New York Times is your real estate partner, it’s amazing the story its pages will tell — more than three pages featuring nine upbeat, luciously illustrated stories in Thursday’s edition.)
The real story is that the Atlantic Yards project — and its companion Downtown Brooklyn Plan — is not about the Nets (whose stadium would occupy a tiny part of the massive site), it’s about a land grab by Ratner and his political clients, the largest, most expensive government seizure of private property for private benefit ever in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Paper was sold in 2009.

What about Barclays?

Michael D. D. White commented 9/21/12 in his Noticing New York blog about the absence of any reference to the interest-rate scandal enveloping Barclays:

The plastered headline “Banking on Barclays” punningly/cunningly (?) evokes the presumed reliability of the banking practices behind the “Barclays” name. It does that notwithstanding that most people who actually read real news should think of LIBOR instead.
But, in truth, the Brooklyn Paper is probably not thinking in this vein: The Brooklyn Paper has never devoted one jot of ink, or even a few electrons of its web edition articles, to spelling out the acronym LIBOR and that includes the nine new feature articles inside the “special section” all of which mention “Barclays” repeatedly. . .

. . One of them is appallingly titled: “The People’s Arena!”