Turner Publishing has just released Leonard Jacobs' first book, Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater 1850-1970. For the hardcover book, Jacobs chose 240 photographs, organized them into coherent sections, and wrote accompanying text. Calling the book "at once concise and comprehensive," Curtain Up's reviewer writes that "historic photos of Broadway's showplaces and show people need a historian to guide us through these pages with facts and anecdotes, and Leonard Jacobs is just the man to make these pictures come to life."
The bankruptcy court judge refused to grant a motion by lender Atalaya to give it ownership of the company yesterday, Creative Loafing (Tampa) reports. Judge Caryl E. Delano ruled that CL's reorganization plan should proceed, and that it was too early into the case to say the plan won't work. On a second part of Atalaya's takeover motion, the judge scheduled the final evidentiary hearing for Jan. 21, and a Jan. 26 hearing has been set to review CL's proposed reorganization plan.
Editor Mark Zusman tells the Oregonian that WW is no longer involved with a Jan. 20 party the paper was slated to co-sponsor with the Democratic Party of Oregon. Zusman said earlier this week that he didn't know the paper was co-sponsoring the event with the Dems until the Oregonian brought it to his attention. The story hit Capitol Hill yesterday, with Republicans telling Roll Call that the co-sponsored party, together with WW's tough reporting on outgoing Senator Gordon Smith during this campaign season, was proof that the paper "was on a mission to oust the Senator."
"After a year in which we had the most employees on staff in the paper's history -- 35 -- last week the Indy laid off two people, a reporter and the promotions coordinator, as well as reduced our freelance budget by 10 percent," Lisa Sorg writes in her editor's note this week. Sorg tells local blog Bull City Rising that the laid off employees are Vernal Coleman and Marny Rhodes, and that she and a number of other managers are taking voluntary pay cuts.
For the paper's Halloween issue, the Mercury ran a cover disguising itself as an issue of National Geographic, which has trademarked its yellow-banded cover design. This week editor Steve Humphrey says he received a letter from National Geographic's executive vice president that proves "not everybody in the world is a humorless dick." The letter said the magazine's first instinct in similar cases is to issue a cease-and-desist letter, but it recognized that the Mercury cover "was not malicious appropriation, but all in good fun." The letter also urged the Mercury to encourage its readers to buy subscriptions to National Geographic.
HuffPo's Chicago site "straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice," reports the Reader's Whet Moser. "They didn't ask permission." He notes that the "read the whole story here" link at the bottom of HuffPo's page is pointless: "(T)hat is the whole article, dumbass." This aggregation-gone-wild led Moser to check the other concert previews on the Chicago site, and he reports that "there's a whole list of concert previews from us, Time Out Chicago, Centerstage, and the Onion's Decider," reprinted in full. MORE: Gambit Weekly's Kevin Allman, the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Steven T. Jones, and Gawker's Ryan Tate weigh in.
