"If you'd told me six months ago that I'd have a job with Westword that basically required me to smoke pot and then give readers my take on toking, I would have asked you for a hit of whatever it was you were puffing on," pot critic William Breathes writes, before explaining what the job has been like so far. "Medical marijuana is something I take seriously, but that doesn't mean I can't have fun with it. I don't think I'll ever get past the kid-in-a-candy-store feeling when I see twenty different strains in front of me," he concludes. "And I know I'll never get used to collecting a paycheck for taking bong hits."
"It was basically four guys sitting around a room talking a lot. We would work on the Chronicle, take a break and talk more. We focused a lot on the big picture, but also the details," Black says about the time he and three friends founded the South by Southwest festival in the late 1980s. "We would sit there night after night and ask things like, 'OK, you land at the airport -- what happens next?'" Black has seen SXSW -- which happens next month in Austin -- grow from a music festival into a huge international event that also incorporates interactive and film festivals, and employs about 40 staffers. But despite the growth, Black says the festival remains true to its roots. "After all these years, SXSW is really still about creative people coming together face-to-face and collaborating," he says.
Mara Shalhoup's BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family, which is being published by St. Martin's Press, is due to hit stores next week. The book springs from Shalhoup's 2006 award-winning three-part series in Creative Loafing (Atlanta), "BMF: Hip-hop's shadowy empire," which examined the rise of the Black Mafia Family, a cocaine-trafficking network with ties to a music label and various violent crimes in Atlanta. BMF leaders Big Meech and his brother Southwest T are each currently serving 30-year sentences.
Of the 2,500 or so recognizable brand logos that make up the Oscar-nominated French short film Logorama, only one belongs to an AAN member. That honor goes to Salt Lake City Weekly, which appears briefly (around the 11-minute mark) in the 16-minute animated short.
A comScore survey done for the Newspaper Association of America finds that newspaper websites are the most-visited and most-trusted sources for local news and information, outpacing local radio and TV websites, portals, and speciality and social networking websites. Approximately 57 percent of the 3,050 respondents said newspaper sites were the top online source for local information; that percentage grew for upper income households (63 percent) and for the college educated (60 percent).
Two law firms have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by the popular user-generated review site. The suit's plaintiff, a veterinary hospital, allegedly requested Yelp remove a negative review from the website. The suit says the company refused to do so, a move that was followed by repeated calls from Yelp sales reps demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review. The East Bay Express explored similar charges in-depth last year. Yelp denied everything in the Express' coverage, and went as far as to attack the reporter for being inaccurate. Regarding the class-action suit, a Yelp representative calls the allegations "demonstrably false" and says the company will "dispute [the suit] aggressively."
New Times editorial operations manager Jay Bennett, a 40-year-old music fan and musician, is authoring the "Nothing Not New" blog, where each weekday, he listens to one new record and writes about it. Music editor Martin Cizmar says the project springs from Bennett's "aesthetic atrophy," an "unavoidable consequence of aging" defined as the "wasting away of the ability to appreciate new, different, or avant-garde music." Checking in a little more than two months into the year-long experiment, Bennett says it has been "fun, but difficult," adding: "It's like traveling abroad for two weeks but really missing American junk food after day 10, or dining out so much that you've forgotten the simple joy of preparing and eating a home-cooked meal."
Nine and a half years after OC Weekly's R. Scott Moxley broke the story about well-known AIDS doctor George Steven Kooshian having injected patients with saline and vitamins instead of the expensive drugs they were billed for, the 59-year-old was sentenced Monday to 15 months in federal prison. Kooshian was also ordered to pay $660,955 in restitution to 18 insurance companies for 21 patients who were subdosed.
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