Tom Gascoyne is ending his 11-year tenure at CN&R, he announced in his regular column yesterday. Gascoyne jokes that he was "scooped" by the Chico Enterprise Record, which published a front-page story on his resignation. ("Talk about your slow news days," he says.) Gascoyne told AAN that he has "become sort of disenchanted with the game. While we try, as a wiser newspaper person once said, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, in the end it is the comfortable who buy all the advertising."

Continue ReadingChico News & Review Editor Resigns

In a blog post dated Feb. 28, Rall announced that he had raised $21,000 toward legal fees for a potential slander lawsuit against Ann Coulter. In February, Coulter said in a speech and a later column that "in response to the Muhammad cartoons, one Iranian newspaper is soliciting cartoons about the Holocaust. (So far the only submissions have come from Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau and The New York Times.)" Rall wrote in a syndicated column that he had received e-mails calling him "an anti-Semite and anti-American traitor."

Continue ReadingTed Rall’s Lawsuit Drive Kicks Into High Gear

Matt Zoller Seitz tells The Villager that the budget of his first film, Home, was about the same as "what the catering costs were for one day of Brokeback Mountain." Once he began showing the movie on the film-festival circuit, he discovered that his reputation as a film and television critic for New York Press translated into media coverage for his movie. "Anybody who reads my writing knows I can be unbelievably mean sometimes, so I feel there's a bit of karmic payback here in reading reviews of my own stuff," says Seitz, who is seeking DVD distribution.

Continue ReadingNY Press Critic Gets ‘Karmic Payback’ With Film Release