In the post-Napster music piracy era, labels are holding advance CDs for the media until just before their release dates, Matt Borlik of Washington City Paper writes. "It's a concept so backwards, so self-defeating, so abso-fucking-lutely idiotic that only a major label executive could have thought it was a good idea," Borlik says. Not only that, alt-weeklies, which write more about music than any other media, are suddenly finding themselves completely off the advance release lists or having to accept streaming audio instead of CDs.
"New Times was a full-throated, outsized voice in a tremendously meek media town," longtime New Times LA columnist Jill Stewart writes in the LA Times. She says New Times is the only alt-weekly chain to "hit the news harder with each passing year" and charges other alties "have become increasingly soft and mired in out-of-touch 1970s-era liberal Democratic mantras."
An alleged cover-up of environmental hazards at the Texas Bureau of Prisons' Federal Medical Center for Women has excruciating consequences for a handful of workers. Fort Worth Weekly's Betty Brink reports that maintenance employees were exposed to high doses of lead while remodeling an unused room into a laundry. The old room still had cabinets lined with inch-thick slabs of lead from its previous use: nuclear medicine. Now two of the workers are critically ill, three workers and one inmate have sued in federal court, and the prison is saying it did nothing wrong.
How does a geeky guy who rarely leaves the house and generally avoids human contact become a pop-culture icon? It helps if he draws alternative comics, a world where nerds rule, alienation is in, and there's no need to apologize for compulsively alphabetizing your CD collection. The hippest of the unhip these days is Berkeley's Adrian Tomine, a shy Japanese-American with a sardonic wit, Buddy Holly glasses and growing legions of fans who haunt comic-book stores to scoop up his sophisticated tales of Gen-X desperation. East Bay Express staff writer Melissa Hung's story reveals what we secretly already suspected: deep down, nerds are really pretty cool.
On Oct. 3, New Times published a short news article about the lewd behavior conviction of Kevin Graves, a producer and television personality at KSBY-TV in San Luis Obispo. The conviction, handed down seven months earlier, never made it into the news until it appeared in New Times. Graves is married to Sharon Graves, a popular weather forecaster on the same station. When the New Times story broke, Sharon Graves abruptly quit her job and left SLO County with her husband and children. The public response to the family's sudden departure was overwhelming, with most callers and letter writers decrying New Times decision to publish the story. In this week's issue, New Times asks several journalists and local personalities: Was the furor the downside to aggressive journalism in a small community? Or was it a case of a newspaper publishing something that should rightfully have remained a secret in the interests of individual privacy?
"The co-opting of the 'underground' tradition of journalism into the more socially responsible and sales-friendly 'alternative' press is now virtually complete," Miami New Times' John Lombardi writes in response to a letter to the editor from Dan Sweeney, calendar editor of New Times Broward-Palm Beach. The '60s gonzo journalism was "a rancid upchuck onto the desks of the reactionary old fart editors of those times." Now he suggests that young writers like Sweeney should look at Al-Jazeera, the independent Qatar-based television station that doesn't ask permission to make everybody furious.
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