The outgoing editor, Jim Harper, told the St. Petersburg Times that Weekly Planet president and CEO Ben Eason "wants a different kind of editor" and is conducting a nationwide search. Harper will retain his post during the hunt for his replacement. He has been the Planet's editor for 15 months. Before that, he worked for more than 20 years at the Times.
Creative Loafing Charlotte "is still waiting for some kind of clarification or retraction after a March 16 WCNC-TV report that had a Charlotte-Mecklenburg vice officer saying that CL is kind of a pimp for illegal 'spas,'" Shannon Reichley writes. No one on the broadcast accused the daily Charlotte Observer, which runs the same ads, of pimping, the alt-weekly's media columnist complains. Still, she's never liked the fact that the two papers earn cash from businesses she describes as legitimate but "sleazoids."
Patients' private medical or psychiatric records could go up on the Web, and there's little the victims could do to get them down, Tara Servatius reports in Creative Loafing Charlotte. Jignesh Tanna of Vashi Transcribe in India threatened U.S. doctors that he'd publish their patients' records if a North Carolina firm, Accuscribe, didn't pay his company the money he felt it was owed. Although he later retracted the warning, the dispute remains unresolved. Servatius describes how outsourcing dilutes the privacy protections contained in the Health Insurance Portablity and Accountability Act.
John Sugg wasn't too pleased to receive a call from an FBI agent telling him he was "all over the wiretaps" the agency had made of fired University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian. Judging from the cover of Weekly Planet Tampa, Sugg even feels a little defiant; he's not naming any confidential sources. The former editor of the Planet and now senior editor of Creative Loafing Atlanta is on the FBI's tapes because he's been covering the investigation of the accused mastermind of terrorism Al-Arian for eight years. In a story for the Planet, Sugg reflects on disclosures he's made about officials working on the government's case.
"When you're out there and you're living that fast life, you can never say what you wouldn't do," Falicia Blakely tells Mara Shalhoup in a jailhouse interview. Shalhoup reconstructs the events that led an 18-year-old to commit murder. The nude dancer was seduced by a club patron who bought diapers by the caseload for her baby and later insisted she sell herself to bring in cash. When her pimp made the ultimate demand, she delivered. The Creative Loafing Atlanta cover story is the first in a series.
Rather than just deliver the same old reliable features and columns every week, editors of AAN papers look for ways to tweak their content, thus attracting new readers and re-engaging the faithful. But there's no sense rounding up a focus group to predict what new ingredients will work when freelancers, staff and the guy on the next barstool are all eager to give their advice. John Dicker interviews editors of four weeklies who messed with the mix to get happy results.
Warnings of a "killer" flu strain that led Americans to be inoculated in record numbers last fall were overblown hype, Tara Servatius reports in Creative Loafing Charlotte. The experts who drove the story "either worked directly for the flu vaccine companies or served on the boards of special interest groups whose activities those companies funded," she writes. Not only was there no remarkable epidemic, but studies show the sought-after vaccine was only 14 percent effective in preventing the illness.
In cities on both coasts, the stimulant crystal methamphetamine has become the party/sex drug of choice among gay men. They call it "tina," Eric Snider reports in Weekly Planet (Tampa). "Tina is attractive because it provides long bursts of energy, a sense of euphoria and well being, and it can make you (along with anyone else who is doing it with you) horny as hell," Snider writes. The downside is that it has the power "to drop its users into a cycle of dependence and depravity, to keep them up for days on end, partying and engaging in extreme, often unprotected, sex." The drug is implicated in the spread of AIDS.
President Jay Smith and his chief financial officer, Charles "Buddy" Solomon, voted against censuring themselves for "violating business and journalism ethical standards" but were overruled by the other six members of Creative Loafing Inc.'s board of directors. The resolution's author, Sterling "Jim" Soderlind, accused the Cox executives of getting "a very good education in the alternative newspaper business while sitting on our board," and then using that knowledge to launch a competing free newspaper, Access Atlanta. John Sugg's Nov. 20 report on the meeting was followed by Smith's response the next week.
