Reporters with a great scoop no longer have to sit tight trying not to burst while they wait for the next week’s paper to roll out, freelance writer Charlie Deitch reports for AAN News. It’s possible to publish online 24/7. Several AAN papers are moving away from the static Web site that remains the same for seven days and then has its contents refreshed all at once. A few alt-weeklies post new material daily, and others turn first to the Web whenever they’ve got an especially hot story.

Continue ReadingWeb Turns Some Alt-Weeklies into Dailies
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

Working from the notes of a fundraiser for Texans for a Republican Majority, Jake Bernstein and Dave Mann explore possible connections between campaign contributions and laws passed by the Texas Legislature. They scrutinize bills that allow line-of-credit home equity lending and increases in customers' gas bills. "The big lie of politics is that money doesn't influence legislation," they write in The Texas Observer, contending the matter was only made worse when legislative districts were redrawn along partisan lines.

Continue ReadingMemo Suggests Link between Donations and Laws

King County Executive Ron Sims had to race ahead with his plan to challenge state law prohibiting gay marriage after the editor of The Stranger showed up at the courthouse on March 5 seeking a marriage license. Bob Young reports in The Seattle Times that gay marriage proponents wanted to have "hand-picked couples" challenge the law but feared the controversial author of the sex advice column Savage Love (pictured) might beat them to it.

Continue ReadingOfficials Didn’t Want Dan Savage to Be Marital Test Case
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

The Democratic contender's eagerness to normalize relations with Hanoi led him to suppress testimony and withhold intelligence information when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, Sydney H. Schanberg writes in The Village Voice. Some veterans and relatives of missing soldiers believe that Vietnam held back American prisoners of war as a bargaining chip for war reparations. But the Kerry committee's final report, issued in 1993, said there was "no compelling evidence" proving anyone was still in captivity.

Continue ReadingWriter Accuses John Kerry of Covering Up Evidence of POWs

Potential advertisers in alternative newsweeklies want to know not only how many people their promotions will reach but what types of people. How old? How educated? How rich? To supply answers, publishers of AAN papers rely on firms that do market comparisons and readership surveys. But, sometimes, research techniques don't quite deliver what publishers are looking for.

Continue ReadingAAN Publishers Seek Best Way to Identify Readers
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

Two members of the Air National Guard unit in Alabama that President Bush was supposed to join in 1972 tell Jackson Baker of The Memphis Flyer that they were expecting Bush, they were waiting for him, and they're sure they never saw him. The Memphis Flyer posted on its Web site today its late-breaking, copyrighted story that responds to the question plaguing Americans: Was George W. Bush AWOL at a time he claims to have been serving in the National Guard?

Continue ReadingTwo Pilots Claim Bush Never Showed Up at Guard Base
  • Post author:
  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Post comments:0 Comments

" Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton," the senior editor of The Village Voice reports. Wayne Barrett leads a team of reporters and researchers who uncover Stone's role in Sharpton's campaign and trace the Republican's subsidies to Sharpton's National Action Network. "Stone is apparently confident that he can use the Democrat-bashing preacher to damage the party's eventual nominee," Barrett writes.

Continue ReadingFlorida Republican Plays Pivotal Role in Al Sharpton Campaign

Nat Hentoff (pictured) last week joined an august group that includes jazz greats like Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald, when he was awarded a Jazz Master Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. "No writer has been a greater friend to jazz than critic, historian, biographer and anecdotist Nat Hentoff," says the NEA. Hentoff's weekly column in the Voice, where he has written for over 30 years, has also made him one of the nation's most prominent defenders of civil liberties.

Continue ReadingVillage Voice Columnist and Critic Hentoff Honored