Fifty alternative newsweeklies in the U.S. and Canada will publish stories this week to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol. The editorial package, conceived and shepherded by staff at Sacramento News & Review, includes a retrospective by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben commissioned by AAN, a look-back by Kyoto participant Ed Smeloff, a drubbing of ABC News Correspondent and global-warming skeptic John Stossel, and a look at the controversial views of Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. Many of the papers participating in the project are also contributing their own stories focusing on local climate-change issues. Sacramento News & Review Editor-at-large Melinda Welsh says the anniversary was "a chance to reveal to millions of alt-weekly readers how little distance we've traveled these last 10 years toward a solution to this giant problem we've created for ourselves and future generations." Links to Kyoto Protocol Anniversary stories may be found at kyoto.altweeklies.com.
"Certainly, the Weekly has accomplished the showy side of going green," says the magazine, referring to the paper's installation of 162 solar panels on its roof earlier this year, "but the Weekly also strives to be green below its roof." Among the small-scale green programs E&P highlights: having a staffer repair bicycles for employees to use in commuting, buying organic produce from the "Vegetable Fairy," and using soy ink. Early last year, the Weekly began calculating its entire carbon footprint, including energy consumption from employee commutes and work routes, with a "Green Team" convening monthly to review the efforts. When the paper repeated its calculation this April, the footprint was 16 percent smaller. "For us this has been a several-pronged initiative," Weekly owner and CEO Bradley Zeve says. "One is around energy, one is around supplies and material, and a third is around our consciousness."
A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in reviewing a case it initially considered in May, reiterated on Monday its finding that Google can display thumbnails of copyrighted photographs in search results, the Los Angeles Times reports. Adult publisher Perfect 10 was arguing that Google violated copyright law by displaying its images in search results. The justices ruled that a larger public interest in searching for information amounted to a "transformative use" that trumped copyright claims. The decision overturns part of a ruling by the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, which had found that Google's thumbnails of Perfect 10's nude models constituted infringement, according to the Times.
In the editorial of E&P's latest issue, the magazine rails against the "Soviet-style arrests" of Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin in the Phoenix New Times grand-jury subpoena fiasco and the "lavish waste of public funds" used by the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation to investigate and ultimately arrest Orlando Weekly employees for "aiding and abetting prostitution." E&P commends the local mainstream dailies in Phoenix and Orlando for sticking up for the alt-weeklies in these two cases. "But dailies too rarely make common cause with their local alt-weekly when they are targeted by the familiar harassments of police ad stings, library banishments, and 'litter' laws concerned more about free papers stacked in a store than candy wrappers on the sidewalk," the magazine says. "Usually that's because the mainstream paper's top people resent the snarky coverage they get from the alternative with its sneering cheap shots. But thuggish local authorities who believe they can act with impunity against alt-papers will soon wonder just how much they can get away with against the mainstream daily."
Much like when it started running Savage Love, Eugene Weekly's decision to run Gustavo Arellano's syndicated column has been greeted with some opposition: letters to the editor have called the OC Weekly staffer "racist," while leaders of the local Latino community have pressed the paper to drop the column. KEZI-TV hits the streets, finds folks "outraged" over ¡Ask a Mexican! and wonders "What's next: 'Ask an Asian'"? "It's even better than that," Arellano writes on the OC Weekly blog, "it's 'Ask a Korean!', and it's pinche brilliant."
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