The Phoenix was named "Newspaper of the Year" in the alternative weekly division by the New England Press Association in its 2007 Better Newspaper Contest. "After 40 years, the Boston Phoenix remains a model for alts, bristling with attitude and loaded with coverage of entertainment, culture, politics, and tweaking of the daily press," the judges say. The Boston alt-weekly led the pack of AAN papers represented in the awards with 12 first-place finishes. Boston's Weekly Dig was close behind it's crosstown competitor, grabbing seven first-place awards. The Portland Phoenix and Worcester Magazine each finished first in three categories, while the Hartford Advocate and the Providence Phoenix each took home one first-place award.
The documents in question were held by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, the same outfit involved in the secret grand jury kerfuffle that led to the arrests of Village Voice Media executives Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey and, ultimately, to the humiliation of county attorney Andrew Thomas and special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik. New Times originally sought the documents in May 2004; MCSO released them five months later, after New Times was forced to file suit. On Tuesday, the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed a lower court's ruling, finding that MCSO "wrongfully denied New Times access to public records." The Court of Appeals sent the case back to superior court "for a further determination on the issue of attorney's fees." In the Arizona Republic, the Sheriff's deputy chief admitted that the officer responsible for complying with public-records requests "was truly afraid of the (New Times) reporter, that there was a genuine personal joint vendetta between the two of them."
Attorney Bob Joyce has started a campaign to rid Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood of the paper, according to the West Roxbury Transcript. Joyce claims that the Phoenix's adult ads don't jibe with the "values of the West Roxbury community." But Phoenix Media executive editor Peter Kadzis says Joyce's motivations are purely political. "Attorney Joyce is active in the anti-choice, anti-gay marriage movements," Kadzis tells the Transcript. "He is trying to halt the Phoenix from circulating for political reasons. His recent crusade against the paper's Adult section is merely an extension of those efforts." Joyce claims he has gotten the paper yanked from six neighborhood businesses, but one merchant who talked to the West Roxbury Bulletin says he doesn't plan to stop carrying the Phoenix. "As far as I know, West Roxbury is still part of the United States of America and the Constitution still covers us over here," says Gary Park of Gary's Liquors. "He is not going to tell me how to run my business."
In October, as the New Times grand-jury probe fiasco bubbled to the surface, reporter Ray Stern was given a criminal citation for disorderly conduct after an argument over taking photos of public records at the sheriff's office. Stern said Monday that a Phoenix prosecutor offered him a fine of $100 or attending anger management classes in exchange for a guilty plea, the Associated Press reports. "I'm not going to (plead guilty)," he says. "I know I wasn't yelling."
On Wednesday, the Phoenix published David Bernstein's "Was It All a Dream?," which called into question whether Romney's father actually marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., as the presidential candidate had claimed in a recent speech and TV appearance. Dogged by reporters over the assertion, Romney yesterday backpedaled and admitted that he never did see such a thing. Yet a spokesperson tells the Phoenix that, even if Mitt never "saw" it, George Romney did march with King, despite historical evidence to the contrary. "I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King," the assistant editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University tells the Boston Globe.
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.
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.
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