According to The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., two brothers have been arrested in a series of 29 burglaries, including 12 at area churches and one at the Eugene Weekly. Editor Ted Taylor tells AAN that the burglars smashed the front door and a cash register during the December break-in, but only made off with change from a charity donation jar. "Jerry, the old homeless guy who camps in our carport every night, wasn't very useful -- he slept through the whole thing," Taylor reports. He also notes that the newspaper has "an ongoing campaign going against our local cops over excessive force and selective enforcement, but they showed up anyway and were very professional."

Continue ReadingSuspects Arrested in Eugene Weekly Burglary

"It’s not all that surprising that the Washingtonian is a really white magazine," writes the City Paper's Huan Hsu, scolding his employer in a sidebar to its 2,900-word demolition of the upscale city mag's lily-white staff and hypocrisy on diversity issues. "It would seem a much bigger problem for the City Paper, which purports to write about a predominately black city, yet is produced by a bunch of young white folks who live in Northwest D.C. Our urban cred is just as contrived as the Washingtonian’s class." (CP's Washingtonian story can be found here; scroll down for Hsu's sidebar.) "It wasn't always this way," according to Hsu, a Chinese-American who grew up in Utah and says he spent most of his "childhood aping the mannerisms of Mormons, not Chinese people." Former Editor in Chief David Carr established a minority fellowship that "wasn't just window dressing," he says, and the paper's "high-water mark (in edit-staff diversity) came in 2001, during Howard Witt’s tenure, when there were three black female editorial staffers and two black female interns." The paper's last minority fellow departed in 2001, and current Editor in Chief Erik Wemple accepts the blame: “It’s clearly my fault that we don’t have more minority representation on staff,” he tells Hsu.

Continue ReadingStaff Writer: Washington CP Edit Staff Has More Utahans Than Black People