U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton this week dismissed some, but not all, of a suit filed in April over the arrests of New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin last year. Bolton dismissed the allegations of racketeering and negligence against special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in addition to dismissing County Attorney Andrew Thomas entirely as a defendant, New Times reports. However, she left claims of gross negligence, malicious prosecution, and false arrest and imprisonment to be handled by Superior Court, unless facts presented in an amended complaint persuade her otherwise (New Times has until Oct. 31 to file such a complaint). Saying that Bolton's ruling "is not a surprise," Lacey writes in a blog post that "her ruling in the current case is consistent with her scant regard for the First Amendment and the rights of a free press."
Joe Glisson, who has been New Times' political cartoonist for 25 years, is celebrating with a new retrospective book, Seems Like Old Times. "I had done the first book [1986's Dome Sweet Dome] a number of years ago, and I thought that I would like to have a companion to it," he says. "And this is the 25th year that I've been doing this, so I thought it was an appropriate time to do a retrospective. I don't know if anybody else feels that way, but I wanted to do it." Read more from Glisson in a Q&A posted at AltWeeklies.com.
New Times filed a complaint in Maricopa County Court on Monday, asking that a judge order Sheriff Joe Arpaio to hand over public records that his office has refused to produce despite public records requests. The paper says the records include video footage of the final moments of an Juan Mendoza Farias' life. Farias, an inmate, died last December after an altercation with 11 jail guards, as the paper reported last month. New Times first filed a request for the video in July, but the paper has been stonewalled. The suit alleges that the withholding "is without merit, speculative, made in bad faith and insufficient as a matter of law to avoid compliance with the Arizona Public Records Law." The sheriff has 20 days to file a legal explanation for not releasing the records.
In the fourth installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Arkansas Times associate editor David Koon talks to Corina Knoll about his feature profile of writer Mohja Kahf, a novelist, poet and sex columnist working to change public perception of Muslim women. Koon talks about finding the story, trying to paint a true picture of a sympathetic source, and how his creative writing background informs his work. "A lot of the things I know -- how to create character, how to create mood and theme -- translate straight across to features," he says. "I think a lot of people who gravitate toward alternative journalism and do it well come from a creative-writing background."
In the third installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Malcolm Gay, a regular freelancer for Riverfront Times, talks to Corina Knoll about his feature profile of author Qiu Xiaolong. Gay, who was formerly a Village Voice Media fellow at the East Bay Express and staff writer at the RFT, says he learned how challenging it is to write about a writer. "What they do physically and in terms of their day-to-day existence is very uneventful. So it's hard to bring drama and animation to those scenes," he says. "That's the challenge: to access that inner world and make it evident in the story."
Rall, whose cartoons and columns appear in many alt-weeklies, took over as president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists on Sept. 12. "For some reason my colleagues have made me president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), the organization for professional political cartoonists. (I suspect cartoonists' predilection for hard drinking had something to do with it.)," Rall writes in his weekly column. "Kidding aside, I'm honored." V. Cullum Rogers, the cartoonist at North Carolina's Independent Weekly, remains the group's secretary-treasurer, and Mikhaela Reid, whose work appears in Metro Times and other AAN papers, was elected to the group's board of directors.
OC Weekly staff writer and ¡Ask a Mexican! columnist Gustavo Arellano's second book is due to be released on Sept. 16. Orange County: A Personal History is a memoir that examines the history of Orange County as seen through four generations of his family moving back and forth between Mexico and Anaheim. Ed Zotti, longtime editor of the syndicated Straight Dope column, also has a new memoir, which was released this week. His The Barn House: Confessions of an Urban Rehabber is a "memoir about fixing up an old house in the city and pursuing the urban version of the American Dream." Check out an excerpt on the Chicago Reader's site. Another memoir on the horizon is Prince Joe Henry's Princoirs. Henry is the longtime author of the "Ask a Negro Leaguer" column in the Riverfront Times, and the book is an extension of the column. If you're not into memoirs, some of Seattle Weekly cartoonist Scott Meyer's "Basic Instructions" comic strips have been collected in the new Help Is on the Way: A Collection of Basic Instructions, which was released this week.
Two AAN members placed in the overall General Excellence categories: Louisiana's Independent Weekly finished second in the Class I division and OC Weekly finished third in the Class III division. In addition, both Riverfront Times (Special Sections and Arts and Entertainment) and Westword (Consumer Affairs and Food and Nutrition) were finalists in two story-topic categories. More than 1,100 entries were submitted to the annual contest administered by the Missouri School of Journalism, which calls it "the oldest and best-known feature writing and editing competition in American newspapering."
Local law enforcement authorities want to determine whether to open an child pornography investigation as a result of photos published in the paper's current issue and on its website, according to the East Valley Tribune. The nude photos of artist Betsy Schneider's children accompany a story about her art, which is featured in a photography show that opened last week in downtown Phoenix. A spokesman in the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and an assistant city attorney in Phoenix's civil division confirm that the police have referred the case. The city attorney says the photos are unlikely to be found illegal, but adds that if they are, "Everybody who picked up one those issues (of the New Times) could be prosecuted for possessing child pornography."
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