Newspeak, a Colorado Springs blog with a strong alt-weekly pedigree, says The Stranger's Slog is "one of the best blogs on the internet and you can skip the local crap if it doesn't interest you." In fact, the folks at Newspeak think the Seattle paper is "the only alt-weekly in the country to have figured out why blogging is an alt's best friend and do it with teeth, wit and style." Perhaps they haven't read the Arkansas Times' Arkansas Blog, which John Brummett of The Morning News calls "by far" the best Arkansas political blog.
A group of national journalism groups, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), sent a letter last week urging Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (pictured) "to treat the Arkansas Times as you do all other media regularly covering the Capitol." Huckabee, who purged the AAN paper from his official notification list last month, didn't respond to the missive, according to the Times. The letters' signatories took exception to the governor's declaration "that the Arkansas Times is not a 'legitimate' newspaper. The fact that it has the fourth highest circulation of any newspaper in your state suggests it has been widely accepted by Arkansas residents and that it has earned the confidence of many of your constituents."
According to a Variety article (reposted on Arkansas Times' blog), Contributing Editor Mara Leveritt's 2002 book Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three will be adapted into a film by Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman, the makers of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Leveritt told radio station KUAR she wasn't worried that the filmmakers' horror-movie background would result in a sensationalized version of her investigation into three teens who were convicted of murder with little hard evidence. "The documentation that's in the book will serve to allow a lot of very accurate representation of the story and of the facts of the story that I reported, so I think it's going to be pretty much a journalistic effort transferred to film," she said.
