"Twelve years is too long for a writer to stay anywhere, particularly in the field of alternative journalism," Greg Land says in his farewell column. He’s off to different pastures, leaving his spot at Creative Loafing to "new blood."
Mara Shalhoup got a lead on a story that's all-too-familiar, and nearly always ignored by the dailies. Tim Peck, a freelance computer guy, walked down the street from his home to get a carry-out burger at the Fox & Hounds. He left the premises in an ambulance with two broken legs after an altercation with off-duty Sheriff's Deputy Kelvin Smith. Creative Loafing's exclusive opens Deputy Smith's personnel file, and it's packed with similar incidents. Shalhoup spent a month researching and writing the story after waiting a month before Peck would agree to talk to her.
Jerry Klein, a columnist for Creative Loafing Charlotte, writes his last column, laying bare his search for spiritual solace after having been "basically leveled, flattened" by fate. He’s moving on after exactly 365 columns and hopes it will be a Great Adventure.
In its summer issue, Columbia Journalism Review tenders "laurels" to three AAN members – The Village Voice, the Nashville Scene, and Tampa’s Weekly Planet – for “good old-fashioned criticism of the big boys in town.” The journalism-mag crowns the beneficiaries with a left-handed compliment: “Who says the alternative press has sold its birthright for a mess of personal ads and restaurant reviews?”
Ben Eason, president of Creative Loafing Inc., tells the Atlanta Business Chronicle that John Sugg will "set [Atlanta] on fire" when he arrives later this month. Sugg is moving to Atlanta from Tampa, Fla., to help improve Creative Loafing Atlanta's investigative writing and to write his own column, Eason tells the business paper.
Bill Boyd is a self-described man of many hats, the most recent of which he donned in June when he became publisher of Tampa’s Weekly Planet. “We are pushing very hard for revenue growth in all of our papers—but particularly this one,” Boyd says.
John Sugg will leave Tampa in late August to become senior editor at the company’s flagship paper, Atlanta’s Creative Loafing. Senior editor “in our lexicon means that I’ll be the lead writer and that I’ll be building and leading the writing team,” says Sugg, who is "second on the masthead" under the paper's editor, Ken Edelstein.
The Village Voice reports that a libel suit originally filed by anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson against Tampa, Fla.'s Weekly Planet, its editor, John Sugg, and former Associated Press reporter Richard Cole, has reached New York in an assault on that state's media shield law. Sugg wrote stories in 1998 and 1999 calling Emerson a fanatic who had, among other things, tried to link respectable Muslim scholars in Florida to the World Trade Center bombing. Emerson claims these and other media stories have damaged his credibility.
