Police say they caught an East Bay man loading piles of free papers -- including the East Bay Express -- into a vehicle early Wednesday morning, the Oakland Tribune reports. In California, taking more than 25 papers is a crime. A witness called police after following the suspect during repeated trips to a recycling center, where the suspect would turn in the papers for cash, according to a police source. No word on if this was the same thief featured on this site last month.
Wayne Laugesen is leaving the Weekly to become the editorial-page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette, Westword reports. In its ad for the job, the Gazette said it was looking for "a libertarian thinker ... in tune with our philosophy of (a) respect for the individual, (b) limited government, (c) free markets, and (d) free trade," which might not seem a great fit for someone who had worked at the progressive Weekly on-and-off for 13 years. But Laugesen never espoused the views shared by most of his colleagues. "It's always been heated and tense, politically," he tells Westword. "I don't know how many times I've written some right-wing thing for the Weekly, which is owned by a left-wing publisher [Stewart Sallo] and has a liberal editor [Pamela White], and somebody has called up and said, 'You're fired.' It's definitely happened -- but generally we were back on good terms within a few days." He speaks well of the Weekly, but says he's excited to be going to an organization where he's "under the same big umbrella, philosophically."
Michael Bowen (The Pacific Northwest Inlander), Skylar Browning (Missoula Independent), Brendan Kiley (The Stranger), and Ashley Lindstrom (San Antonio Current) have been named fellows in the fourth National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater at USC's Annenberg School. The fellows will participate in a rigorous 10-day program in February with guest faculty including L.A. Weekly theater editor Steven Leigh Morris.
