Matt Bors and Tom Tomorrow both report that they have lost several papers in the last few months.
The popular cartoonist, aka Dan Perkins, is asking his fans to sign a petition in support of returning his widely syndicated strip, "This Modern World," to the print edition of the Manhattan alt-weekly. Although the cartoon still appears online at villagevoice.com, Perkins reports via his blog that it was dropped from the paper "sometime in the last two or three months."
The 2006 list of "50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers" was published this week, and the former New York Press editorial staffers who walked out in protest are at #50, right below Chloe Sevigny and Vincent Gallo. "You didn’t think we were going to let this issue go without some kind of dig about our predecessors, did you?" the writers ask. Editor Harry Siegel and three other staffers resigned in February when the paper's publishers refused to print the controversial Muhammad cartoons. The current Press writers say, "This mountain-into-a-molehill gave them a semi-Warholian 13 minutes of fame, while we were left picking up the pieces. ... Thanks, guys!" The New York Press publishes its "Loathsome" list annually.
In a blog post dated Feb. 28, Rall announced that he had raised $21,000 toward legal fees for a potential slander lawsuit against Ann Coulter. In February, Coulter said in a speech and a later column that "in response to the Muhammad cartoons, one Iranian newspaper is soliciting cartoons about the Holocaust. (So far the only submissions have come from Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau and The New York Times.)" Rall wrote in a syndicated column that he had received e-mails calling him "an anti-Semite and anti-American traitor."
The Stranger's staff was ready for a protest after running the controversial Muhammad cartoons last week, Editor Dan Savage writes on Slog, The Stranger's blog. Instead, they were targeted by four members of Catholic Youth Abstaining (C-YA) who were upset by the paper's humorous coverage of their efforts to put the "Saint" back in "St. Valentine's Day." The blog also contains a photo of the four "humor-challenged, orgasm-deprived kids" holding a sign with a picture of Jesus and the words "be mine." Savage reports that the protest ended abruptly after 10 minutes and speculates,"Maybe they were afraid we were going to come down and fuck them?"
AAN members are among the media outlets that have become targets of form e-mails generated by RightMarch.com. The messages forcefully state, "in solidarity with the people of free Europe and in support of the concept of freedom of the press, you need to PUBLISH the Danish cartoons." Alt-weekly editors, however, suggest that their only response will be to use the "delete" button.
Derf (aka John Backderf) gets ideas for his cartoon through cultural osmosis. As he wanders around the city, he stumbles across all kinds of material. His award-winning cartoon, The City, is carried by alternative weeklies across the country. This is the 25th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
Editor John Mecklin takes aim at a "smelly BS-offensive emanating" from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which, he says, contains "huge doses of distortion, some outright falsehood, and very little truth." Mecklin says the "capper" to this offensive is the predatory-pricing lawsuit that Bay Guardian filed last week against SF Weekly and its sister publication, East Bay Express. The Bay Guardian has long tried "to convince San Francisco of the dangerous evil that a New Times-owned SF Weekly represents," writes Mecklin. "Over that time, SF Weekly has sailed ahead, and the Bay Guardian has foundered." (Second item on linked page.) Also addressed: SF Weekly's response to Puni-comic controversy. (Main item on linked page.)
