Missouri state Rep. Roman LeBlanc announced on Friday that he won't be seeking reelection after a story in The Pitch detailed his sexual involvement with an 18-year-old college student who he had mentored since she was 15. The student accused LeBlanc of sexually assaulting her, but prosecutors decided there was not enough evidence to file charges against LeBlanc, who has maintained his innocence.
"Now everyone in the world is a blogger, which means everyone on earth is a gossip columnist," the longtime Village Voice gossip columnist tells The Awl. "I used to compete with maybe five people, now you're competing with like five billion people." He says the increased competition is "kind of fabulous ... It certainly makes me scramble harder to stay relevant, but it also means everyone in the world has a voice."
The IFC-owned Independent Film Center, which is owned by Cablevision and Jimmy Dolan, has pulled its $400/week print advertisement from the Village Voice, "following our trenchant commentary on the sale of Gothamist to Rainbow Media, replete with a joke about Mr. Dolan's penis that required the attention of his corporate publicity and legal affairs crews," writes the Voice's Foster Kamer. "In a rare breach of editorial and sales, I'd like to openly apologize to the ad salesperson who closed that account: I'm sorry Jimmy Dolan's penis cost you some commission," Kamer continues. "If you'd like me to write your child's college admission's essay, I'll do it pro-bono. I'd just give you the money, but I've spent the last four days considering Jimmy Dolan's penis. The pay is proportionate."
"Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins" had its world premiere Wednesday night at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. The play, which stars Turner as Ivins, offers a "complex, nuanced sense" of the former Texas Observer editor "in all her loud messiness," according to Politics Daily. Half the words in the play are from Ivins, and the other half were written by Margaret and Allison Engel. "The day after Molly died I was so upset that her voice was gone that I called Allison and said we have to do a show about her," Margaret says. "I felt she was our Mark Twain, our Will Rogers, and by 'ours' I meant the country's."
In a Monday post about the rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog network by Cablevision, the Village Voice's Foster Kamer wrote: "Wonder how [Gothamist publisher Jake] Dobkin's gonna feel with Jimmy Dolan's cock in his mouth?" Dolan, the Cablevision CEO, has a reputation as being aggressive and sometimes litigious. That reputation seems to be well-deserved, as his corporate communications team pounced on Kamer's post with multiple emails and a follow-up call to a Voice editor that said Cablevision lawyers were looking into the post to see if it could be considered defamatory. "As a guy who was once named as a defendant in an employee's high-profile (and ultimately successful) sexual harassment lawsuit, Dolan should understand the difference between what one could and could not get away with when discussing things like where one puts one's penis," Kamer shoots back. "And thankfully, there's no law that's going to force us to take Jimmy Dolan's figurative cock out of anyone's mouth. Least of all ours."
White uses most of his space in this week's New York Press review of Greenberg to reflect on the controversy that spilled out last week over his being disinvited from the film's screening. The snub, which was the subject of much chatter among New York film and media types, was allegedly due to White's calling for the mother of Greenberg director Noah Baumbach to have an abortion. As this allegation was debated on the web, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman dug up a copy of the review, which wasn't available online, from the public library and posted it online in a post titled "Proof That Critic Armond White Did Call for Noah Baumbach's Abortion." (By the way, Baumbach's mother, Georgia Brown, was a Voice film critic in the 1980s.) That gesture was not looked upon kindly by White, who contends that Hoberman "deliberately mischaracterized the review," before attacking the longtime Voice critic for "normaliz[ing] the arrogance of class privilege" and calling him "a force behind racist snobbery" and "the scoundrel-czar of contemporary film criticism." MORE: Hoberman responds.
In its annual State of the News Media report, the Project for Excellence in Journalism notes that the combined circulation of AAN member papers dropped by nearly 7 percent in 2009, adding to the 5 percent drop in 2008. But the report points out that many small-market papers grew circulation in 2009, and that alts, like other newspapers, are increasingly moving to digital platforms. Village Voice editor Tony Ortega tells PEJ that alt-weeklies are coming out of the downturn in better shape than dailies, due to a more flexible business model and the fact that alts have always been free. "There's no doubt that the economy was just as hard on alternative weeklies as it was on the dailies," he says. "But it's also obvious that some alt-weeklies have come through the tough times in better shape than others."
Feiffer says Backing Into Forward, to be released Tuesday by Doubleday, is a "cautionary tale" about "getting rejected and slapped in the face by the powers-that-be." The 81-year-old Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, best known for his long tenure at the Village Voice, says "the boy-cartoonist in me ... remains foolishly idealistic as ever." He remembers starting to draw his Voice strip in 1956, a year after the paper was founded, thinking: "The more painful the subject ... the funnier it should look."
Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back "is the latest zippy collection of columns and essays" from the Village Voice nightlife/gossip columnist, according to press materials. Musto, who is currently celebrating his 25th anniversary at the Voice, talks to Black Book about New York nightlife, social networking and writing a daily column. "Sometimes it's on the days that you have nothing to write about that you do your best work because it forces you to dig inside yourself and come up with some high concept," Musto says. "I come up with good stuff like advice to celebrities, telling them how to get a life, or I'll just do questions and let the readers do the work for me." MORE MUSTO: In a video segment, he talks to Streetsblog about his preferred mode of transportation: his bicycle.
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