Jennifer Maerz's last column for The Stranger, "Goodbye to All That: Or, Our Music Editor Gets All Mushy on Her Way Out," appears in the Feb. 2 issue. Maerz is moving to San Francisco, where she will be the music editor for SF Weekly, in order to be closer to her boyfriend. Maerz writes, "I've really loved it here -- this paper carries a strong, funny, enthusiastic, and truly independent vision of what political and cultural coverage should be. That approach is rare to find." SF Weekly's former music critic, Garrett Kamps, wrote his final "OK Then" column for the Feb. 1 issue. Dave Segal will be the new music editor for The Stranger.
The departure of Harmon Leon, who wrote the paper's regular "Infiltrator" column, was announced in a Jan. 18 Editor's Note (here, last item). In last week's column, Leon wrote about "infiltrating" the Adult Video News awards show, but as local Web site SFist later noted, he misidentified the city in which the show was held. According to the Editor's Note, Leon initially claimed that he had written about a previous AVN show, but the paper later discovered that he was actually at a different adult-entertainment awards show and that he had already written about that event for another magazine. Following the publication of the Editor's Note, SFist criticized the Weekly for its handling of the incident, and said that morale at the paper "may be in decline after the departure of (former editor) John Mecklin."
The owner of the Warfield Theater in San Francisco filed suit against Bill Graham Presents on Oct. 13, according to the Bay Guardian. The suit alleges that BGP -- a Clear Channel subsidiary which operates the Warfield under a lease that expires in 2008 -- damaged the value of the theater's name by changing it to the SF Weekly Warfield. The naming rights were sold by BGP in June to SF Weekly-parent New Times.
