Kentucky state employees were prevented from accessing BluegrassReport.com today, a day after the blog's author criticized Republican Gov. Ernie Fletcher in an article in the The New York Times. When Mark Nickolas, a Louisville Eccentric Observer columnist and former Democratic political consultant, wrote this morning that his blog had been blocked by the Fletcher administration, his report was picked up by political bloggers like DailyKos and Atrios. It was soon discovered that other blogs had been blocked as well and were no longer accessible to Kentucky state employees. By this afternoon, a spokesperson for Fletcher admitted that the sites had been blocked, but claimed that the action was part of the state's routine Web-monitoring plan to prevent state employees from visiting "non-business-related" Web sites during working hours.
"Do journalists in New York do any original thinking at all?" asks Chuck Taylor, managing editor of Seattle Weekly. The paper's July 20, 2005 cover -- which just won a third-place AltWeekly Award for Illustration -- is remarkably similar to the cover of the most recent BusinessWeek. Both feature the banner headline "Bill Gates Gets Schooled" and depict Gates in a classroom.
Public officials and the media have exaggerated the incidence of methamphetamine abuse in the United States, according to a 41-page report issued last week by the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C. think tank. "The Next Big Thing: Methamphetamine in the United States" (available as a PDF here) references Willamette Week's "Meth Madness," in which reporter Angela Valdez argued that Portland's daily paper had "sacrificed accuracy" in order to campaign against meth. "The Oregonian series repeatedly referred to a 'meth epidemic' in Oregon without providing any statistical support, mischaracterized the significance of the growth in methamphetamine treatment admissions, and suggested a link between Oregon property crime rates and methamphetamine use that has been generally refuted by empirical research," the report says.
Erik Wemple's coworkers at Washington City Paper had been "excited about the opportunity" for him to become editor of the Village Voice, he tells Mediabistro's FishbowlDC a week after changing his mind about taking the position. That doesn't mean they were anxious for him to leave: "Proof of Wemple's worth to the City Paper can be found in the fact that you'll be hard pressed -- and trust us, we've tried -- to find a CityPaper employee who's not pleased to have Wemple back in the saddle," FishbowlDC Editor Patrick W. Gavin writes. Wemple does acknowledge that "there are clearly legitimate questions about whether my head is in the game at this stage" -- questions that he intends to answer by doing solid work.
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