Nick Schou has followed up his 2006 book on Gary Webb with Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, which was released yesterday. The book examines the Brotherhood, dubbed the "Hippie Mafia," which grew from a small group of surfers to the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation. Schou tells his Weekly colleague Matt Coker that he had to go to some extraordinary lengths to track down Brotherhood members for the book. "I had to hike a mile up a really remote slope in Maui to talk to a Buddhist hermit who was able get me an interview with Ram Dass, [Timothy] Leary's Harvard philosophy colleague and acid researcher," He says. "Another time, I had to play guitar with a Brotherhood smuggler who has a cable access television show in Santa Cruz."
A lawsuit filed by the Bank of Montreal on behalf of a group of institutional lenders seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction to stop the San Francisco Bay Guardian's efforts to collect millions of dollars from SF Weekly as part of 2008's predatory-pricing jury verdict. Last week, a Superior Court commissioner ruled that the Guardian is entitled to half of the Weekly's ad revenue; the banks are arguing that they have the first legal right to any money made by the Weekly. Meanwhile, The Stranger reports that it has court filings that show Weekly parent company Village Voice Media Holdings has been declared in default on an $80 million loan it has from the Bank of Montreal. This comes as the Weekly is asking for a separate restraining order to stop the Guardian from sending letters to Weekly advertisers; they say advertisers have been receiving conflicting notices from the Guardian and Bank of Montreal about who has first rights to the Weekly's revenue. In a court filing, the Weekly's lawyer says the confusion, if allowed to continue, "is likely to devastate SF Weekly's advertising business beyond repair."
"We're hoping you can lean back with this thing, curl up on the couch and take it into the bathroom and read it," the digital director for Village Voice Media Holdings said at Saturday's "iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators" session at SXSW. Jensen thinks the iPad will help publishers who value quality design and journalism, by giving them a more visual platform to work with than the general web. "It's going to bring back nice-looking design, and good-looking ads, too," he said.
The Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority is violating the First Amendment with its ban on news boxes at the public airport, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled. The decision affirms a lower court ruling in favor of four newspaper companies that sued the airport authority in 2004. Lawyers for the airport had argued the ban was reasonable, and that news boxes would pose security risks, impede passenger flow, degrade airport aesthetics and reduce airport authority revenue from shops inside that sold newspapers. But the Fourth Circuit panel says none of those arguments are strong enough to restrict the distribution. "The government interests asserted to justify the ban do not counterbalance its significant restriction on protected expression," the opinion reads.
In its annual State of the News Media report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism notes that the combined circulation of AAN member papers dropped by nearly 7 percent in 2009, adding to the 5 percent drop in 2008. But the report points out that many small-market papers grew circulation in 2009, and that alts, like other newspapers, are increasingly moving to digital platforms. Village Voice editor Tony Ortega tells PEJ that alt-weeklies are coming out of the downturn in better shape than dailies, due to a more flexible business model and the fact that alts have always been free. "There's no doubt that the economy was just as hard on alternative weeklies as it was on the dailies," he says. "But it's also obvious that some alt-weeklies have come through the tough times in better shape than others."
A federal appeals court has ruled that Nevada has the right to ban certain advertisements of legal brothels, saying it doesn't violate the First Amendment of free speech. The decision overturns the ruling of a federal district judge, who held the state did not have the right to impose the restrictions on advertisements after a suit challenging those limits was brought by Las Vegas CityLife, the High Desert Advocate and brothel operator Bobbi Davis. "Nevada has tailored its restrictions on advertising to attain a reasonable fit between ends and means," the opinion reads. CityLife editor Steve Sebelius says he was surprised and disappointed by the ruling. "Given the fact that it is a commodity, I think it's inappropriate for the state to restrict First Amendment-protected advertising about that commodity," he says. READ MORE from Sebelius on his CityLife blog.
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