Fishermen and citizens harmed by what's been called the worst environmental disaster in Spanish history are looking to a Houston ship classification society to bear some responsibility, writes Josh Harkinson in the Houston Press. In November 2002, the oil tanker M/V Prestige sprang a leak, then split in half and sank 130 miles from the Spanish shore. Now the American Bureau of Shipping, which inspected the ship shortly before it sank, is the subject of lawsuits asking for $1 billion.
A Long Island Press news team looks at the implications of the $100 million class-action suit filed Feb. 10 by four Queens advertisers. They accuse Newsday of using a "Fudge ABC" computer program to fool the Audit Bureau of Circulation about its figures. The daily paper allegedly gave extra loads of unordered papers to distributors on audit days and regularly sent vanloads of unsold papers to the dump. Anonymous sources "with executive-level experience at the paper confirmed to the Long Island Press that at least the essence of the allegations" are true, the team reports. Other advertisers could join the class-action suit.
The Houston Chronicle obtains only brief comments from Tim Fleck, the 57-year-old author of the weekly column The Insider, and Houston Press Editor Margaret Downing, about the circumstances of the departure. Others assess the impact of Fleck's acerbic political coverage. In his last column for the Press, Fleck writes about Congressional candidate Lloyd "Ted" Poe, known for the shame sentences he handed out as district judge, and the time Poe underwent his own moment of shame.
Some Cincinnati police officers claimed to be in two places at once so they could double-bill the city and the public housing authority, Leslie Blade reported in CityBeat on Dec. 10. Now the Cincinnati City Council wants to ask her questions about the scandal so badly it voted 5-4 last week to subpoena her. CityBeat Editor/Co-Publisher John Fox criticizes the decision to make a journalist an investigative tool of government.
Robert Meyerowitz will find average temperatures 60 degrees warmer when he leaves Alaska in January to become editor of Honolulu Weekly. "In the five years that Meyerowitz has been editor, the Press has largely forsaken potty mouth to produce thoughtful and provocative journalism that you didn't have to agree with to admire," writes Rosanne Pagano in the Anchorage Daily News. Pagano, a journalism professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, praises the Press (which is not an AAN member) for its wide range of stories, including a probe of a for-profit business that managed rural school districts.
"Throughout the day I'd witnessed police provoke protesters," writes Celeste Fraser Delgado, who was reporting on the protests surrounding last week's free-trade meetings. "I'd seen young people cuffed and lined up along the street, but I thought they must have done something bad to be detained." Her perceptions quickly changed when she was handcuffed and jailed by Miami police who ignored her press credentials. Her crime: Doing "nothing but walking down the street."
It's déjà vu all over again in Vancouver, where the venerable alt-weekly is under attack from B.C. Liberal ministers. In what Publisher & Editor Dan McLeod calls "the biggest threat in its 36-year history," the Straight has been stripped of its status as a newspaper under provincial sales-tax legislation and assessed fines and penalties that will total more than one million dollars by year's end. McLeod, whose paper was "prosecuted frequently under a wide assortment of trumped- up charges" in its early years, calls the new attack "a politically motivated attempt by the government to silence one of its harshest critics."
Houston's alternative newsweekly was never an enthusiastic cheerleader for the so-called Houston Miracle, the "public relations barrage" that landed former Houston schools superintendent Rod Paige his job as U.S. secretary of education. So PR whiz Terry Abbott (pictured), "the man behind the curtain of the 'miracle'", last week announced an official policy that he would do his best to ensure that no school district employee ever speaks with the paper. "We just can't get any kind of fair shake out of the Houston Press," says Abbott, whose new policy applies to "a few reporters at other organizations and then the Houston Press in general."
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