In 2004, Jonathan Ames wrote and acted in a pilot for Showtime, yet it never aired. Until today. What's Not to Love? is based on Ames' 2000 memoir of the same name, which sprang from his "inflammatory, exquisitely worded, and often tastelessly brilliant columns for the New York Press," according to Showtime. The 30-minute show will debut tonight at 11:30 pm, and will be on Showtime On Demand until Jan. 15.
The paper has dropped its lawsuit asking a federal judge to declare the law that makes it a crime to publish the addresses of certain people on the internet unconstitutional, the Arizona Business Gazette reports. The statute was the one that began the recent grand-jury investigation of New Times and the arrests and controversy that followed. Since the threat of prosecution against the paper had been dropped, "it made no sense to tilt at windmills," Village Voice Media executive editor Michael Lacey tells the Gazette. However, since the case was dismissed "without prejudice," the paper could reinstate its case if there is any subsequent investigation. Lacey says he would hope all the publicity surrounding the case would convince the county attorney not to try to enforce that law against New Times or any other publication.
The Hartford Courant announced plans Tuesday to sell the Valley Advocate, an alt-weekly covering western Massachusetts, to Newspapers of New England Inc., which owns newspapers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Editor & Publisher reports that the sale lets the Courant focus its attention on its properties in Connecticut. The Advocate will continue to share content and do cross-market sales with the remaining alt-weeklies the Courant purchased in 1999 from New Mass. Media: the Hartford Advocate, the New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly. The sale is expected to close later this month; terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Press' Becca Tucker stalked the My So-Called Life star in an effort to show just how easy it is to stalk celebrities in New York City, but Danes wasn't thrilled, according to Gawker. Jeff Berg, the chairman of International Creative Management, which represents Danes, called editor David Blum on Friday and asked him to redact online a reference to the street where she lives. "He got very hostile," Blum says, noting that Berg asked, "What are you going to do, print her phone number next?" The paper did keep her building number out of the story, by redacting it from a direct quote from New York magazine, which gives her full address online. "I'm no more inclined to print her phone number than to print her exact street address," Blum says.
In the editorial of E&P's latest issue, the magazine rails against the "Soviet-style arrests" of Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin in the Phoenix New Times grand-jury subpoena fiasco and the "lavish waste of public funds" used by the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation to investigate and ultimately arrest Orlando Weekly employees for "aiding and abetting prostitution." E&P commends the local mainstream dailies in Phoenix and Orlando for sticking up for the alt-weeklies in these two cases. "But dailies too rarely make common cause with their local alt-weekly when they are targeted by the familiar harassments of police ad stings, library banishments, and 'litter' laws concerned more about free papers stacked in a store than candy wrappers on the sidewalk," the magazine says. "Usually that's because the mainstream paper's top people resent the snarky coverage they get from the alternative with its sneering cheap shots. But thuggish local authorities who believe they can act with impunity against alt-papers will soon wonder just how much they can get away with against the mainstream daily."
Judge Anna Baca said yesterday that special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik failed to comply with the law when he issued four subpoenas against the paper, the Arizona Republic reports. Wilenchik neglected to notify the court that any of the four subpoenas had been issued and failed to notify the foreman of the grand-jury about two of them. The judge assessed no sanctions, since the subpoenas have been quashed. New Times founder and Village Voice Media executive editor Michael Lacey, who was arrested with Jim Larkin in the ensuing brouhaha, told reporters that the judge's conclusion validated what New Times has been saying. "It means we are continuing to peel back the layers of a very rotten onion," he said. "As we suspected and as we've written, this was a corrupt process." The paper has hired its own attorney to conduct an investigation into how the case was handled, according to the Republic.
Documents showing how subpoenas were obtained and executed during the grand-jury investigation into New Times are missing from a court file, which has led Judge Anna Baca to order the Maricopa County Attorney's office to turn over those documents by Wednesday and appear at a hearing next Monday, the Arizona Republic reports. At issue is if there was more wrongdoing during the course of the investigation than is currently known. The County Attorney's office has already admitted that prosecutors didn't notify the grand-jury foreman and judge within 10 days of issuing subpoenas in the New Times case, which is required by Arizona law. New Times writer Stephen Lemons asks: "Could the subpoenas be missing because they might offer proof that Wilenchik did not play by the rules?" He points to a new column by Michael Lacey which says that the special prosecutor personally demanded he and Jim Larkin be arrested, asked for the arrests of the paper's attorneys, and "sought tens of millions of dollars in sanctions, fines that would have bankrupted New Times."
The decision handed down last night by the Chandler Public Library Board ended a mini-brouhaha in this Phoenix suburb. It all started a few months ago, when Larry Edwards made public his objection to New Times being available at a library branch shared by a high school. The board also ruled that George Carlin's audiobook When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? would stay in the library.
A few weeks ago, the Press published a cover story claiming that the author of the New York Times Magazine's "Questions For" column had repeatedly broken the paper's code of ethics by reshuffling her Q&As and even making up questions. The story was batted around the internet, and ultimately Times public editor Clark Hoyt argued in his weekly column that Deborah Solomon's column should come with a disclaimer. Now Gawker reports that Solomon told students at Columbia University last week that the column will indeed come with a disclaimer, though the Times has not yet announced such a move and the column was disclaimer-less this past weekend.
Special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik has previously said that he did not know who sent Maricopa County sheriff's deputies to pick up Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin earlier this month after they revealed the Phoenix New Times was the target of a grand jury probe. But on Friday, a police spokesman said that the arrests were ordered by M. Rob Somers, an attorney at Wilenchik's firm and one of four attorneys at the firm deputized by County Attorney Andrew Thomas to be special prosecutors, the East Valley Tribune reports. "Is Wilenchik the Sgt. Schultz of the Arizona bar?," asks New Times' Stephen Lemons, referring to the famed Hogan's Heroes character. "He knows noth-ink, NOTH-INK about what's going on in his own office with highly-paid attorneys under his direction?"
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