The cover of the paper's annual gift guide depicts a tan-and-white hamster with a yarmulke and traditional payes, resting a front paw on a dreidel. "A rodent as a symbol for the Jew has a long and notorious history, which becomes apparent even if you do a rudimentary search on the internet," the Jewish Exponent reports. An angry letter to the Weekly reads: "Where did your art director receive her training? At the Heinrich Himmler Academy of Design?" The hamster, ironically enough, is the pet of the Weekly's Liz Spikol, who is Jewish. She tells the Exponent she doesn't find the image offensive, and she doesn't "understand why Orthodoxy would be offensive. I just thought it was a fun image in context of our theme," Spikol says. "I didn't find it problematic," adds an Anti-Defamation League regional director. "We don't find anything objectionable about this."
After discovering the only thing a candidate has to do is fill out a notarized nomination form to get on Arizona's Feb. 5 presidential-primary ballot, Weekly writer Jim Nintzel decided to offer readers a chance to seek the presidency. And thus, Project White House, the paper's first-ever presidential-primary contest, was born. Readers are invited to send their campaign materials via mail or email to Project White House. If deemed newsworthy, the paper will give their campaigns some ink. Even if not, the Weekly may still help them get on the ballot by notarizing their nomination forms at no cost.
After being ordered by a Superior Court judge to turn over more than 300 photos of a March 14 crime scene, an attorney for the Independent says the paper plans to appeal the ruling. Meanwhile, photographer Paul Wellman is scheduled to appear in court next week for contempt proceedings, according to the Independent. "We think the protections provided by California reporters' privilege laws do not allow the state to turn newspapers into prosecuting agencies on their behalf, and so we are fighting this ruling," publisher Randy Campbell says. In other legal news, a judge on Monday allowed the copyright case brought against the Independent by the daily Santa Barbara News-Press to go to trial. However, the Indy says the ruling was mixed: Though the claim of copyright infringement survived and will see trial in January, the judge "entirely dismissed the News-Press' three claims of unfair business competition, intentional interference with business advantage, and negligent interference with business advantage." The final claim -- that the weekly stole trade secrets from the daily -- will be litigated at a later date.
"Why can't I, as a fellow weekly-newspaper guy, muster up much sympathy for the Shepherd Express?," asks Weekly associate editor Bill Frost in response to yesterday's news that Milwaukee's alt-weekly was having some distribution issues involving the local daily (and its free weekly) and coffee giant Starbucks. "Because City Weekly has never been allowed into Salt Lake City Starbucks; at least the Express had a foot in the door for a while," he writes. "Now, just as Salt Lake City residents have for years, Milwaukee-ites will have to sip their overpriced Charbucks while reading an inferior knockoff of a weekly that has an exclusive, paid-for in."
"We were thrown out of Starbucks because of a deal the Journal Sentinel cut with Starbucks' regional office, where the Journal Sentinel demanded that the Shepherd Express be excluded from Starbucks newspaper racks," writes Express publisher and editor-in-chief Louis Fortis. The Sentinel-owned free weekly MKE then ran an ad claiming it was "the exclusive free weekly" available at Starbucks stores around Milwaukee. But a regional manager says "the decision as to whether a particular Starbucks carries the Shepherd will be at the discretion of each individual store manager." The controversy with the coffee giant comes as the paper celebrates its 25th anniversary. In this week's cover story, assistant editor Lisa Kaiser traces the Express' journey from "a monthly 'free expression magazine' by English majors at UW-Milwaukee" to what it is today.
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