Reader media columnist Michael Miner reports that publisher Michael Crystal resigned from the paper yesterday. The interim publisher is Kirk MacDonald, who is chief operating officer of Creative Loafing, Inc. He expects to spend three days a week in Chicago, according to the Reader. Steve Timble, the founding publisher of Time Out Chicago, has been named the new associate publisher, and is "Crystal's heir apparent," according to Miner. Crystal, who had been publisher since 2004, will move back to Seattle. "[He] was an unruffled sort of executive whose manner recalled the good old days at the Reader, when there was nothing much to get ruffled about," Miner writes. "Those of us who remember those days remember them fondly." In other Reader news, this week the paper launches a pullout music section and additional design updates.
The Buffalo alt-weekly had for months been trying to obtain meeting minutes and budget documents from a board charged with negotiating a merger between two area hospital operators. But the board claimed to be exempt from New York State's laws regarding open meetings and freedom of information and wouldn't turn over documents, so associate editor Buck Quigley joined a lawsuit to force the board to release them. On Friday, Judge Patrick NeMoyer ruled in favor of Quigley and the other plaintiffs on every count. Artvoice editor Geoff Kelly writes that, in addition to shining light on the board's activities, the ruling is "also a precedent: The next time a public/private authority claims to be exempt from New York State laws regarding openness, we have a court case to wave under their noses."
Moving Midway: A Southern Plantation in Transit, a documentary directed by longtime critic Godfrey Cheshire, was released last week and is garnering good reviews so far. Cheshire, a three-time AltWeekly Award winner for criticism published in North Carolina's Independent Weekly, "connects his longstanding interest in American popular culture with the lore attached to his ancestral home, a North Carolina plantation called Midway" in "a fascinating and complicated story of regional identity," writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times.
Last week, 13 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Republican senators urging them to support the Free Flow of Information Act. "As our states' chief law enforcement officers, we are in a unique position to confirm that our shield laws have not resulted in any degradation in our ability to protect our citizens," the letter reads. "Still, important provisions have been added to this legislation to carefully and thoroughly protect national security and public safety." A House version of the bill was overwhelmingly approved last October, and the Senate Judiciary Committee also approved the bill in the same month.
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