In June, North Carolina's Independent Weekly released an issue featuring a transgendered individual on the cover, which ultimately caused the paper to be pulled from some Raleigh-Durham area Mellow Mushroom pizza restaurants. "The picture on the front cover ... was eye level of children in our waiting area," the local franchise owner explained to the Bull City Rising blog. "We have carried the Indy for so long I forgot it was there until a soccer mom complained about it. After a few more comments/complaints we removed them." Local bloggers publicized the decision and blog commenters vowed to boycott the restaurant and placed calls to the owner, and eventually the Mellow Mushrooms reversed course. "I absolutely regret the decision to remove the Indy from the restaurants," he wrote in a comment on Bull City Rising yesterday. "On Monday I was in contact with the Indy to bring it back to our stores. They want to bring it back as well and it will be there any day. The last thing we intended to do was discriminate against anyone."
New owners Manhattan Media told the New York Observer last week that the Press would no longer accept "explicit" advertising, and the decision is being praised by the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, the New York Times reports. "[Manhattan Media CEO] Tom Allon is a trailblazer," Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW in New York City, says in a press release. "He sees the future of the newsprint business, and that future isn't reliant on the fast, cheap money of the prostitution industry." Believing that adult ads foster human trafficking, NOW's New York City chapter is asking publications to stop running the ads and sign an antitrafficking pledge called "Trafficking Free, NYC!" (Manhattan Media has signed on). The Times says the Village Voice hadn't yet returned calls for comment on the pledge.
Last week, a 19-year-old follower of the Yusuf Bey family shot and killed Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working on an investigation of the group and its headquarters, Your Black Muslim Bakery. Fortunately, former East Bay Express reporter Chris Thompson's run-in with the group didn't end so grimly. In 2002, the Express published Thompson's investigative series alleging acts of torture, rape, and sodomy perpetrated by the group. After the stories were published, the retaliation began. "Someone smashed up the windows of [the Express'] offices, and Thompson received numerous death threats," according to the Village Voice, where he's currently a staff writer. "Men repeatedly tried to follow Thompson home, or staked out routes he took leaving the office." Express editor Stephen Buel tells the San Francisco Chronicle that the intimidation campaign forced Thompson to work in a different county for months, and shook the paper to the point that "we stopped writing about the group."
"The goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer," the New York Times reports. To do this, Digitas, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, plans to create thousands of digital versions of ads using low-cost offshore labor, and then will use data about consumers and computer algorithms to decide which message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or TV. The Times notes that Publicis is "trying to carve out a niche as a middleman" between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and the consumer brand companies that buy advertising. "It's clear the three of those companies will have a huge share of revenues which will come from advertising,†says Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of the Publicis Groupe. "But they will have to make a choice between being a medium or being an ad agency, and I believe that their interest will be to be a medium."
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