The Stranger's staff was ready for a protest after running the controversial Muhammad cartoons last week, Editor Dan Savage writes on Slog, The Stranger's blog. Instead, they were targeted by four members of Catholic Youth Abstaining (C-YA) who were upset by the paper's humorous coverage of their efforts to put the "Saint" back in "St. Valentine's Day." The blog also contains a photo of the four "humor-challenged, orgasm-deprived kids" holding a sign with a picture of Jesus and the words "be mine." Savage reports that the protest ended abruptly after 10 minutes and speculates,"Maybe they were afraid we were going to come down and fuck them?"

Continue ReadingThe Stranger’s Office Picketed — By Four Catholic Abstinence Advocates

Jonathan Gold has reviewed everything from opera to architecture, but it was his mouth-watering food criticism that won him a first-place AltWeekly Award. Gold tries to include as much description of the setting as of the food, to give readers a "vicarious experience" of "how the restaurant might integrate into their lives." And while he can easily drop a reference to béchamel, he is just as likely to mention Fatboy Slim. This is the 37th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.

Continue ReadingJonathan Gold: Giving Cuisine a Context

In January, City Paper writer Gadi Dechter exposed several instances of plagiarism by Michael Olesker, a columnist at the Baltimore Sun, which he found through searches of the LexisNexis database. The Sun's editors followed up on the charges with a laborious manual search of the newspaper's archives. In a Feb. 15 column, Dechter explores the reasons why the Sun's editors chose not to use the plagiarism-detecting software CopyGuard and then puts it to the test, using Olesker's work as the guinea pig. The results: the software works fairly well, and even exposed one case where another journalist appeared to plagiarize Olesker.

Continue ReadingBaltimore City Paper Considers Software’s Usefulness in Olesker Case

Joel McNally has a new medium for the liberal views he regularly expresses in his Shepherd Express political column: He has been tapped to co-host the weekday morning show on WMCS-AM radio in Milwaukee. The Journal Sentinel describes WMCS as "focus[ing] on an African-American audience"; McNally, who is white, said, "We are in this thing together, and we are in this community together, and while the right-wing stations don't make it seem that way, black and white is the future of Milwaukee." The station manager told the newspaper that there may be "disparaging" callers "in the early going," but he hoped that new dialogue could result.

Continue ReadingShepherd Express Columnist Adds ‘Diversity’ to Black Radio Station