Alternative newsweeklies across the country have bucked the trend of unquestioned support for the president and the new war in Afghanistan. They’ve also paid the price for their criticism, with retribution ranging from yanked ads to death threats.
Ben Eason, president of Creative Loafing Inc., tells the Atlanta Business Chronicle that John Sugg will "set [Atlanta] on fire" when he arrives later this month. Sugg is moving to Atlanta from Tampa, Fla., to help improve Creative Loafing Atlanta's investigative writing and to write his own column, Eason tells the business paper.
John Sugg will leave Tampa in late August to become senior editor at the company’s flagship paper, Atlanta’s Creative Loafing. Senior editor “in our lexicon means that I’ll be the lead writer and that I’ll be building and leading the writing team,” says Sugg, who is "second on the masthead" under the paper's editor, Ken Edelstein.
The Village Voice reports that a libel suit originally filed by anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson against Tampa, Fla.'s Weekly Planet, its editor, John Sugg, and former Associated Press reporter Richard Cole, has reached New York in an assault on that state's media shield law. Sugg wrote stories in 1998 and 1999 calling Emerson a fanatic who had, among other things, tried to link respectable Muslim scholars in Florida to the World Trade Center bombing. Emerson claims these and other media stories have damaged his credibility.
