SF Weekly's October 2006 cover story about the detached management style of former U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan turned up in one of the emails released in the Justice Department's latest document dump. "Thought you might be interested in this; It's from a local weekly," Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote to several colleagues as he forwarded Martin Kuz's tale of mismanagement and upheaval within the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco. According to Kuz, "while the other seven deposed U.S. attorneys earned mostly high marks for their work, Ryan arguably deserved his fate."
The parent company of SF Weekly and East Bay Express hired local litigation specialists Kerr & Wagstaffe to replace Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffein in the predatory-pricing lawsuit brought against those two papers by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Kerr & Wagstaffe is the third firm involved in the defense of the lawsuit, set to go to trial in mid-July, reports Legal Pad, a blog focusing on California law.
A Superior Court Judge has declined to delay the trial in the San Francisco Bay Guardian's predatory pricing suit against its two main competitors, Village Voice Media papers SF Weekly and East Bay Express. The Guardian charges the two weeklies with selling ads below cost in an effort to put it out of business.
The San Francisco Police Department has admitted that it secretly searched the phone records for calls made from the press room at the city's Hall of Justice, the local NBC affiliate reports. The snooping was first revealed in a Sept. 27 SF Weekly article by A.C. Thompson. "Dealing with a leak problem of its own in 2003, the police department used HP-style tactics, covertly examining the phone records -- reflecting 2,478 phone calls -- of journalists covering the department," Thompson wrote. "By doing so, the SFPD could quickly identify any anonymous tipsters or inside sources within the department who communicated with the reporters." The department spokesperson told SF Weekly that the investigation was legal because the department owned the phone lines that were involved.
"When you talk about secrecy and indefinite detention, the problem is bigger than most people realize," SF Weekly Staff Writer A.C. Thompson tells In These Times magazine. Thompson has co-authored a new book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights, with Trevor Paglen, an expert on clandestine military installations. The pair also discussed the book on the Sept. 15 Democracy Now! program, where Thompson told interviewer Amy Goodman, "I've written about police abuse in America for many years and about people being abused in American prisons. But the sort of similarity of the stories we heard from prisoners [in CIA facilities], the intensity of them, it kind of took us aback a little bit, and it was pretty gripping."
The winners of the Clarion Awards were recently announced, and Patricia Calhoun, editor of Westword, took first place in the Regular Opinion/Editorial category, small circulation division, for her weekly column. Houston Press Staff Writer Todd Spivak also won for his feature story "Against All Odds" in the small circulation division, and SF Weekly Staff Writer Cristi Hegranes won for her feature story "The Identity Makers" in the large circulation division. Both men and women are eligible for the Clarion Awards, which are presented by The Association for Women in Communications.
Leon speaks freely in a vitriolic interview with SFist, a blog that covered SF Weekly's termination of his regular "Infiltrator" column. Leon blames Editor Tom Walsh for the two misleading columns that got him in trouble and says, "Tom Walsh is the worst editor I've ever worked for. The reason I say this, an editor's job is to make a writer look good, not to make people question a writer's credibility." Nevertheless, Leon claims that he is "not bitter about the whole thing" because he "enjoyed working with John Mecklin" and is "happy with the body of work" he produced.
