Tim Nelson, the Democrat challenging Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, is running a radio ad accusing Thomas of ordering the October 2007 arrests of Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey because they reported in Phoenix New Times that they had been served a sweeping subpoena from a special prosecutor demanding information about the paper's online readers, Editor & Publisher reports. The ad says Thomas is responsible for "arresting journalists in the dark of night in front of their families because of what they published," and accuses Thomas of using KGB tactics. (New Times reports that Thomas tried to get the commercial pulled from local airwaves.) "Make no mistake about it: the New Times subpoenas and arrests were a massive abuse of power and the public trust," Nelson said at a press conference yesterday. "They have brought ridicule to our county and its justice system."
"No one here told John Conroy to lay off police torture," is the headline to Michael Miner's blog post written in response to last week's Chicago Sun-Times column on Conroy's work on police torture at the Reader and a related piece from the Beachwood Reporter, an online newspaper. Editor Alison True strikes the same chord in a separate blog post, saying that "I encouraged John to explore other subjects," but "never asked him to lay off police torture."
U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton this week dismissed some, but not all, of a suit filed in April over the arrests of New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin last year. Bolton dismissed the allegations of racketeering and negligence against special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in addition to dismissing County Attorney Andrew Thomas entirely as a defendant, New Times reports. However, she left claims of gross negligence, malicious prosecution, and false arrest and imprisonment to be handled by Superior Court, unless facts presented in an amended complaint persuade her otherwise (New Times has until Oct. 31 to file such a complaint). Saying that Bolton's ruling "is not a surprise," Lacey writes in a blog post that "her ruling in the current case is consistent with her scant regard for the First Amendment and the rights of a free press."
Reader media columnist Michael Miner reports that publisher Michael Crystal resigned from the paper yesterday. The interim publisher is Kirk MacDonald, who is chief operating officer of Creative Loafing, Inc. He expects to spend three days a week in Chicago, according to the Reader. Steve Timble, the founding publisher of Time Out Chicago, has been named the new associate publisher, and is "Crystal's heir apparent," according to Miner. Crystal, who had been publisher since 2004, will move back to Seattle. "[He] was an unruffled sort of executive whose manner recalled the good old days at the Reader, when there was nothing much to get ruffled about," Miner writes. "Those of us who remember those days remember them fondly." In other Reader news, this week the paper launches a pullout music section and additional design updates.
Tom Piazza's new novel City of Refuge, released yesterday by Harper books, features an editor of a fictional New Orleans alt-weekly named Gumbo who evacuates to Chicago after Hurricane Katrina. As the Times-Picayune points out, that character "certainly bears a resemblance to Michael Tisserand, former Gambit editor." But Piazza explains that all the characters are fictional. "Even if a writer is writing a novel about his or her best friend, in the course of that writing, the friend turns into something else -- a character," he says. When asked about the resemblance, Tisserand tells Gambit that "the scaffolding [for the character] is in part me, but the building is all Tom's."
The Associated Press Managing Editors association selected winners for its annual awards this week in New York, and the group cited New Times in the First Amendment category for "for aggressively investigating and reporting on grand jury subpoenas seeking notes, tapes and confidential sources related to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an investigation that expanded to other citizens." The awards will be presented during the group's September conference in Las Vegas.
Outgoing editor Liz Garrigan reports that she had "openly recommended Scene managing editor Matt Pulle for [her] job, and he was seriously considered." But in the end, Village Voice Media brought Pete Kotz over from the soon-to-be-defunct Cleveland Scene, a move that was criticized by some of the paper's staff. "Bypassing Matt sent exactly the wrong message to the city: It said that the Scene is just another interchangeable cog in a big corporate wheel," one staffer says anonymously. Former Scene media critic Henry Walker agrees. "The idea of an alternative weekly paper importing an editor would have been almost unthinkable just a decade ago," he says. "[But VVM] has pioneered the adoption of a cookie-cutter news and design formula and the employment of fungible editors among the alternative weeklies." VVM executive editor Michael Lacey, for one, isn't buying Walker's critique. "For nearly 40 years, we, like most alternative newspaper owners, have selected editors, writers and columnists based upon their skill, not their birth certificate," Lacey says. "Walker's simplistic comments reflect parochial jingoism."
Canada's Print Measurement Bureau recently released numbers showing a 14.2 percent drop in NOW's readership over the past two years, according to the Globe and Mail. The Canadian daily uses the readership drop as a springboard to examine the state of Toronto's alt-weeklies -- NOW and its competitor Eye Weekly, which is in the same ownership group as the daily Toronto Star. "Alt-weeklies are a particular case. Entirely reliant on advertising revenues, their revenue is not augmented by subscriptions or newsstand sales," the Globe and Mail reports. "At the same time, they're threatened by a panoply of other free offerings." NOW publisher Michael Hollett shrugs off the latest numbers, and says the paper's health is strong. "It's just one of many ways of counting," he says. "Our boxes are empty and business is good." Indeed, the Globe and Mail reports that NOW's ad revenue was up in 2007, and Hollett notes that the paper continues to innovate -- and gain readers -- online.
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