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To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision abolishing segregation in public schools, Gambit Weekly asked New Orleans high school students to write about the ruling's impact on them. Segregation takes many forms, the students observe. Ninth grader Vinnessia Shelbia contends that the school system, by focusing on black "high achievers," belittles African American students' futures. The result: too many "end up cleaning up after the ones who went to good schools."

Continue ReadingNew Orleans Students Write about Brown v. Board of Education
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At age 7, Westword reporter David Holthouse was raped by the teenage son of his parents' friends. A year ago, he became obsessed with the idea of finding and killing the man who had darkened his childhood, in order to prevent him from harming others. And then Holthouse's parents discovered one of his childhood diaries, and the secret was out.

Continue ReadingWriter Confronts Man Who Raped Him 26 Years Ago
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A gigantic metal wall dissects Nogales, a city in Arizona and the state of Sonora, Mexico. On the Mexican side, huge figures press up against the wall. One figure depicts a green-skinned Border Patrol agent chasing some migrants with a big stick, another a migrant returning home to Mexico with an American washing machine loaded onto his back. Other representations warn of the dangers in the desert: the saguaros growing out of a cluster of skulls, the fiery desert curling like a rattler underfoot, Mexicans carrying home the body of a dead compañero in a shroud. Margaret Regan reports on this controversial art and the message its creators hope to spread.

Continue ReadingBorder Art Installation Sends Message about Migrant Deaths

Two forms of online advertising -- one very hot today, the other a little cold -- were central in online publishers' minds Wednesday at the Interactive Media Conference & Trade Show sponsored by E&P and Mediaweek magazines. Paid links, which have accounted for much of the growth in online advertising revenues, will remain hot, according to Patrick Keane, head of advertising sales strategy for Google, one of the leaders in this space. He said that while only 5% of Web pages are search pages, consumers actually are making buying decisions just about everywhere on the Web -- as they randomly surf, read news, or conduct research. "We want to help publishers get a piece of that," said Keane, referring to Google's ongoing contextual ad partnerships with publishers.

Continue ReadingPaid Links are Easy, Cross-Media Still a Hard Sell

Circulation of The Stranger has grown, and it's now 10,000 to 12,000 copies a week behind the more established Seattle Weekly, Mike Lewis reports in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Stranger publisher Tim Keck says the Weekly, which is regarded as more serious, is "boring." Weekly editor Knute Berger describes The Stranger, which is considered more humorous and sensationalistic, as "juvenile." Lewis writes that the two weeklies have "slowly, subtly become more like each other in an effort to establish dominance in a midsize media market...."

Continue ReadingTwo Weeklies Duke It Out in Seattle Newspaper War
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Atrocities like the torture and killings of unarmed civilians in Vietnam and the sexual humiliation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq are not the mere result of rogue soldiers but stem from what historian Christian Appy identifies as "a doctrine of atrocity," Nicholas Turse writes in The Village Voice. Turse cites military officers' descriptions of the Asian mind and now the Arab mind as one that only understands force. Four other writers also contribute articles to the Voice's special report on the lessons of Abu Ghraib.

Continue ReadingU.S. Has a Tradition of Institutionalized Brutality, Writer Says

Two weeks after it refused to continue carrying a church newspaper, Kroger is removing three other weekly papers from its free distribution racks. Louisville, Kentucky's alternative weekly, LEO, is among the banned. A Kroger spokesman told reporter Peter Smith of The Courier-Journal that the store's biggest issue with some of the publications was "the sexual nature of much of the advertising they contain." John Yarmuth, LEO's founder and executive editor, calls the ban "a horrible business decision."

Continue ReadingKroger Removes LEO, Other Papers from Grocery Stores

Three-hundred new pedestal newspaper kiosks have been installed in downtown San Francisco, replacing free-standing racks, Joe Rogers reports for KCBS-740 AM. Media giant Clear Channel will maintain the new racks, which feature a billboard on the back. Mayor Gavin Newsom says the racks are intended to clean up some of the city's sidewalk clutter.

Continue ReadingOn the Streets of San Francisco, Kiosks Replace News Racks

Visitors to online newspaper sites are more likely to be interested in politics than the general online population, according to a Nielsen// NetRatings Political View analysis of survey data conducted for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA).

Continue ReadingOnline Newspaper Readers More Political
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The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley governments is that they have been slow to embrace high-tech innovations, many produced by the 7,300 tech companies sitting in their backyards, William Dean Hinton reports for Metro Silicon Valley. In Santa Clara, you still have to view criminal records on microfiche, and there's no reliable search engine on the city of San Jose's Web site. The recognized leaders in E-government aren't on the West Coast but in cities like Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Mo.

Continue ReadingSilicon Valley Governments Are Still Cybersloths