His fabrications in The Village Voice were "neither culturally significant nor journalistically shocking," Philadelphia City Paper founder and former owner Bruce Schimmel writes in his weekly column, and the disciplinary actions that resulted were "a shot across the bow of the mother ship of New Journalism." But Duane Swierczynski uses his editor's letter to disagree: "If we're not vigilant about separating truth from fiction, can you imagine what schoolkids will be saying about George W. Bush in 200 years?" Fabrications are too often rewarded, and editors who prod writers for amazing dialogue need to be equally passionate about checking accuracy, Swierczynski argues.
A recent survey of AAN papers revealed that the applications alt-weeklies are using to track circulation are as diverse as the newspapers themselves. A few papers rely on their in-house wiz for a custom-made program, but for the rest of the industry, a commercial package is the only sophisticated option. Alt-weekly circulation insiders describe their woes, successes, and dreams of better uses for the numbers.
"It’s not all that surprising that the Washingtonian is a really white magazine," writes the City Paper's Huan Hsu, scolding his employer in a sidebar to its 2,900-word demolition of the upscale city mag's lily-white staff and hypocrisy on diversity issues. "It would seem a much bigger problem for the City Paper, which purports to write about a predominately black city, yet is produced by a bunch of young white folks who live in Northwest D.C. Our urban cred is just as contrived as the Washingtonian’s class." (CP's Washingtonian story can be found here; scroll down for Hsu's sidebar.) "It wasn't always this way," according to Hsu, a Chinese-American who grew up in Utah and says he spent most of his "childhood aping the mannerisms of Mormons, not Chinese people." Former Editor in Chief David Carr established a minority fellowship that "wasn't just window dressing," he says, and the paper's "high-water mark (in edit-staff diversity) came in 2001, during Howard Witt’s tenure, when there were three black female editorial staffers and two black female interns." The paper's last minority fellow departed in 2001, and current Editor in Chief Erik Wemple accepts the blame: “It’s clearly my fault that we don’t have more minority representation on staff,” he tells Hsu.
Eight of the prospective members are previous applicants, and two are owned by alt-weekly veterans who had been members during a previous association with different papers. AAN members will also be asked this year to evaluate Boston's Weekly Dig and Des Moines' Cityview, the first two post-sale newspapers whose membership will be reviewed under a process established in 2004 when the association's bylaws were amended. The fate of all of these papers will be determined at the organization's next Annual Meeting, which will be held in Little Rock on Saturday, June 17, the last day of the 29th annual AAN convention.
In January, City Paper writer Gadi Dechter exposed several instances of plagiarism by Michael Olesker, a columnist at the Baltimore Sun, which he found through searches of the LexisNexis database. The Sun's editors followed up on the charges with a laborious manual search of the newspaper's archives. In a Feb. 15 column, Dechter explores the reasons why the Sun's editors chose not to use the plagiarism-detecting software CopyGuard and then puts it to the test, using Olesker's work as the guinea pig. The results: the software works fairly well, and even exposed one case where another journalist appeared to plagiarize Olesker.
This week's issue contains a defense of former Baltimore Sun columnist Michael Olesker by former Sun writer David Simon. Olesker was asked to retire earlier this month after City Paper's Gadi Dechter found that Olesker had lifted language from other writers at the Sun, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Simon argues that "most reporting -- unless it utilizes confidential sources or results from some investigative effort or special project -- has a short shelf life before it becomes nonproprietary," and says that if Olesker is a plagiarist, so are all journalists.
Gadi Dechter, who writes the City Paper's biweekly Media Circus column, found several examples of similar language between Michael Olesker's columns in the Baltimore Sun and work by other writers in the Sun, the New York Times and the Washingon Post. Dechter decided to pursue the story after a Dec. 24 correction of an Olesker column referred to a failure of attribution rather than plagiarism. The Sun's city editor initially told Dechter that there would be no further investigation of Olesker, so Dechter and a research assistant took on the process of checking language from Olesker's past columns against the LexisNexis database. "There was something unusual in the correction, as if it were just a mistake," Dechter says. "Olesker is kind of an institution here in Baltimore, so I set about checking it out." A story in the Sun this morning announced that Olesker had resigned.
Corey Hutchins, editor in chief of the 17-month-old Columbia City Paper in South Carolina, discovered the damage from the fire in his home on Saturday. He then "announced that he will resign, effective immediately," according to a City Paper statement. Hutchins believes the incident is linked to his work on the newspaper, which has drawn criticism for reporting on a sexual discrimination lawsuit against a University of South Carolina department chair and for publishing the governor’s private telephone number in an editorial on the death penalty. "When the police showed up at the house after the fire, they asked me if I had any enemies," Hutchins said in the City Paper statement. "I told them I was the editor of the Columbia City Paper. I didn't exactly have to provide them with a list is what I'm saying."
Kathryn Drury had about 40 Christmas gifts to ship. Procrastinating until the bitter end, she was forced to wrap all the presents in a rush one evening. When she ran out of traditional holiday paper, she improvised with a stack of old newspapers. It wasn't until the next day, after the gifts were mailed, that it dawned on Drury that her ersatz wrapping paper was the Village Voice, home to "pages and pages of personal ads, including gay porn, leather, punishment, phone sex and escort services," Drury tells The Burlington Free Press. "I had just sent boxes of presents to my husband's very Catholic family adorned with naked ladies in string bikinis and muscular, well-oiled men in jock straps."
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