Superior Court Judge Joan M. Lewis issued a temporary order preventing the San Diego Reader from publishing details about Polyheme, a blood substitute still in testing, that were obtained under the California Public Records Act. Northfield Laboratories Inc. had sued the Reader last month to stop publication of the information, which Northfield calls "trade secrets." On July 28, the Reader had published an article saying that Polyheme was being tested in downtown San Diego and in poor minority neighborhoods, on trauma patients who were unable to consent. A Northfield spokesperson said the two sides would meet next week in an attempt to reach an agreement.
The two papers swept the Newspaper Feature Story category in this year's contest, which is administered by the Association for Women in Communications. The Loaf's Mara Shalhoup won in the circulation above 100,000 category, for Learning to Hit a Lick, which also won the Feature Story category in this year's AltWeekly Awards. And the Express' Kara Platoni won in the under 100,000 category, for The Ten Million Dollar Woman. The awards were presented this weekend in Lubbock, Texas.
We don't know enough about art or classified advertising to answer that question definitively, but the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's upcoming "I Saw You" exhibition certainly qualifies as rare and unusual. The exhibition, which opens Nov. 4, features work by SAIC students "inspired by the Chicago Reader's I Saw You classifieds," according to the school's Web site.
Creative Loafing Inc. CEO Ben Eason informs us that he has named Michael Sigman to head the chain's flagship paper in Atlanta. Sigman worked at LA Weekly for 18 years, first as general manager, then later as president and publisher of both LA and OC Weekly, before leaving parent company Village Voice Media in Jan. 2002. Following his departure from VVM, Sigman took over as president of MajorSongs, the publishing house of his late father, the songwriter Carl Sigman, and issued a limited-edition box set of recordings of some of his father's songs.
On July 30, Fran Zankowski is leaving his role as chief executive officer of the company that publishes the Hartford Advocate, the New Haven Advocate and the Fairfield County Weekly, all in Connecticut, and the Valley Advocate in Massachusetts. He has been CEO of New Mass. Media since 1999, when the company was purchased by The Hartford Courant. Zankowski chairs the AAN board's Organization and Bylaws Committee, whose proposed amendments to the AAN bylaws were accepted at the annual membership meeting in June. He is also a member of the Admissions Committee.
The owner of the Atlanta Journal- Constitution no longer has a 25 percent stake in the chain of alternative weeklies. Tensions between Creative Loafing, Inc., and Cox executives erupted last year when the Journal-Constitution launched its own entertainment weekly, AccessAtlanta in the same market as Creative Loafing Atlanta, Caroline Wilbert reports in the the Journal-Constitution. Cox executive Charles "Buddy" Solomon told the Atlanta daily he agreed to the sale "to put all of this behind us."
