Wayne Laugesen of Colorado's Boulder Weekly believes there are times when a member of the media must cease being a spectator and take action. As such, he traded his usual pen for a sledgehammer and smashed a bunch of windows, reports Westword media critic Michael Roberts. Laugesen felt that an order directing homeowner Paul Wenig to reinstall antiquated windows he'd removed from his historic residence needlessly endangered two children who lived there. To Laugesen, destroying the windows was the obvious solution. Of the incident, he wrote in his Sept. 9 column: "Every broken window was a score for fatherhood, husbandry, and God-given liberty."
The Texas Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Dallas Observer in a lawsuit brought by two Denton County public officials, reports the Houston Chronicle. Judge Darlene Whitten and District Attorney Bruce Isaacks sued the paper for libel over a satire published in 1999. The piece, titled "Stop the Madness," was a parody of the actual arrest of a 13-year-old girl for reading a graphic Halloween story to her class. The Supreme Court backed its 8-0 ruling by saying that a reasonable reader of the entire article about a fictional 6-year-old girl's arrest would realize it was not true and was intended as satire.
When an attorney for Newsday advertisers filed a federal racketeering suit against the daily paper last February, alleging circulation fraud, the AAN-member newsweekly, Long Island Press, jumped on the story. Reporter Christopher Twarowski found evidence of undelivered papers dumped in landfills, wooded lots and recycling bins, and interviewed former distributors and retailers who supported some of the lawsuit's claims. This week Newsday publisher Raymond Jansen announced his early retirement, and Twarowski reports that a grand jury has been impaneled in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn to hear testimony on the alleged fraud.
Pittsburgh Catholic apparently believes that its hometown alt-weekly should be wrapped in a brown bag and handed out from behind the counter. "We need to ensure that our children are protected from unhealthy and exploitative images of sexuality," says a representative of the local diocese who thinks it's "unconscionable" that Pittsburgh City Paper is openly distributed in public. “I’m not running a day care center,” City Paper editor Andy Newman tells the paper. “I have a newspaper, and I feel like other people are responsible for supervising their own children.”
In an interview with A.J. Daulerio of The Black Table, New York Press editor-in-chief Jeff Koyen doesn't disappoint those who expect from him "a certain level of infamy," as Daulerio puts it. Koyen claims the alt-weekly model "is dead or dying," and the aging, liberal editors of those "stale, homogenous products" have lost touch with the young. He admits the Press, too, was aging badly, but he's trying to convert it back into "a venue for emerging talent." The result is more and younger readers, he says.
Marty Beckerman was in a Washington, D.C., bookstore in March pushing copies of his new book, "Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace." Mike DeBonis reports on the early success of the 21-year-old American University student. While Beckerman was a summer intern at New York Press in 2002, then editor John Strausbaugh helped him connect with a literary agent. The young author tells Washington City Paper the deal he struck with MTV/Pocket Books should get him through a semester of college.
Alt-weeklies may have to stop branding themselves as the papers unafraid to print the word "fuck." Editor Ben Fulton says Salt Lake City Weekly was briefly kicked out of Wal-Mart "because we used the f-bomb in our paper," Glen Warchol reports in The Salt Lake Tribune. City Weekly lost a week's distribution at the chain after a self-identified Christian stumbled upon the word in its pages and complained to the store's regional managers. Wal-Mart let the paper return based on promises of increased vigilance about the use of profanity.
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