Held at the Medill School of Journalism, AAN's reporter training focuses on alt-weekly-centric issues, including innovative ways to cover news and arts, as well as fresh looks at narrative storytelling. The annual workshop has expanded to include sessions for design and production staff, such as time-saving tricks for Creative Suite 3 and how to design ads for the web. Registration for members is $75 until July 27. Nonmembers can register for $150. The Hotel Orrington will provide accommodations for a special fee of $119 per night.
The OPEN Government Act of 2007, which would put teeth into the Freedom of Information Act, is being blocked by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ). The only way to overcome Kyl's hold and to get the OPEN Government Act passed is to convince his Senate colleagues to put pressure on the Republican Senate leadership to allow a vote to be scheduled. And they're only going to do that if they hear from their constituents on the matter. AAN is asking member papers to get involved: to contact the office of both of your senators and urge them to tell Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to allow the OPEN Government Act to get to the floor for a vote. Ask your senators to become co-sponsors of the bill. Cover this important issue in your papers, and encourage your readers to call their senators with the same message. Richard Karpel, executive director of AAN, underscores the importance of this issue: "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve FOIA."
Yesterday at the Newspaper Association of America's Mid-Year Review, Matt Ferguson said he doesn't consider Craigslist and other sites with free employment classifieds to be much of a competitive threat. "The problem with free is that you don't invest in the technology, you don't invest in the customer service, you don't invest in the sales people. You don't invest in the things that are the differentiators in this business," he said. "I don't think there's a free model in the future."
Last month, Willamette Week ran a cover story on the working conditions of illegal immigrants employed at the Del Monte Fresh Produce food processing plant in North Portland. Last week, federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the plant and arrested 167 undocumented workers. ICE's affadavit (pdf file) cites and quotes from the Week's story, but also notes that "there are no indications that there was an ICE leak" that tipped the paper off. In other words, the ICE raid was already in the works. In an update this week, reporter Beth Slovic writes that the response to the piece before and after the raid has been interesting. "Before the raid, readers who already sympathized with illegal immigrant workers largely praised the May 2 story for describing working conditions at the plant. Unsympathetic readers saw it as a weak-kneed defense of law breakers," she writes. "The raid flipped those responses, prompting some readers to fault the story for naming the plant and others to praise it for apparently aiding agents in their bust."
Yesterday, the City Council unanimously approved an ordinance banning freestanding news boxes from the city center and surrounding neighborhoods, the Dallas Morning News reports. Existing news boxes will be replaced by eight-window modular newsracks and standardized news boxes. The cost for publishers to distribute in the newsracks will be $179 per year for each newsrack, according to the Morning News. Currently, publishers pay a $5 licensing fee per news box. Placement in the newsracks will be determined by lotteries. Dallas Observer publisher Stuart Folb was quick to criticize the ordinance, saying "an unlucky publisher could be eliminated from the marketplace." Folb also hinted at litigation against the city if this "results in unreasonable restrictions on a publisher's ability to distribute its newspaper."
The alt-weekly finished in first place in the Excellence in Design, Presentation and Use of Photos category in this year's Better Newspaper Contest, sponsored by the Montana Newspaper Association. Award winners were announced Saturday.
At Saturday's First Amendment Luncheon, the former federal prosecutor for New Mexico who helped sparked the scandal presently engulfing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Bush Administration discussed loyalty, politics, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) with Santa Fe Reporter editor Julia Goldberg. "I'm still processing the damage that could be done to the rule of law [by the administration]," he said. Among other things, Iglesias also said that John Ashcroft's staff at the DOJ was older and more experienced than Gonzales', and that Gonzales led a shift in the department from "working for the people" to "working for the White House." We have three video clips available from the luncheon. Part one is embedded below; part two can be found here, and part three, here. MORE: Read bloggers' reactions to the Iglesias' speech at the convention blog.
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