The finalists for the last three AltWeekly Award categories are now in. The leaders in the large-circulation and small-circulation divisions each picked up an additional award, with The Village Voice increasing its overall award count to ten, and the Santa Fe Reporter swelling its total to six.
On the JFP blog "Noise," Editor Donna Ladd noted similarities between a Marshall Ramsey cartoon in Jackson's The Clarion-Ledger and a Darren Schwindaman cartoon published in JFP two weeks earlier. Both play on the Brokeback Mountain catch phrase, "I wish I knew how to quit you" to comment on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's veto of a tobacco tax. Ladd wrote, "We appreciate the compliment, Marshall, but a note of appreciation would have sufficed."
According to Editor & Publisher, Coulter was speaking to a conservative group on Feb. 10 when she joked, "Iran is soliciting cartoons on the Holocaust. So far, only Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau, and The New York Times have made submissions." Rall, whose cartoons appear in several AAN member papers, asked readers of his blog if they would pledge money to support a lawsuit against Coulter. Rall said he doubts that Coulter's "claims of 'humor' or sarcasm will fly with a jury since (a) she's not funny and (b) her audiences take her literally and she knows it." In an update, Rall announced that votes were running 3-1 in favor of suing.
Harry Siegel, one of four editorial staffers who resigned from New York Press last week, participated in a discussion of the Muhammad cartoons with Mike Luckovich, an editorial cartoonist, and Jim Warren, deputy managing editor of The Chicago Tribune (which did not run the cartoons). Siegel called the cartoons "very amateurish and very vile" before arguing that "it seems Orwellian to talk about this at such length without showing the images." Siegel also tangled briefly with Warren, who asserted that "characterizing the cartoons in great detail" was sufficient to cover the story.
