Noticing that The Washington Times hadn't run a single correction in nine days, City Paper editor Erik Wemple decided to provide that service in his own pages. Wrong name, wrong block, wrong date of crime: Such errors will be duly noted and corrected in the alt-weekly. City Paper will "manage this critical function," Wemple writes, because the Times "lacks the resources to run its own corrections."
It's likely that Iraq could devolve into civil war, but there's no assurance that sending in more U.S. troops will solve anything. So where do we go from here? Reporters from The Boston Phoenix interview nine foreign-policy experts. Their advice ranges from calling on Iraqi leaders to quell the violence in return for troop withdrawals to refusing to turn governing authority over to the Iraqis until the situation is brought under control.
The copying didn't go undetected because The Village Voice Online has too many readers in Canada. A former teaching assistant called the Toronto Star to point out that the narrative structure and phrasing in Prithi Yelaja's story about U.S. Army deserter Brandon Hughey reminded him of what he'd read in the New York City alt-weekly two days earlier. Star ombudsman Don Sellar reports that nearly a third of the Star article was rooted in a Village Voice story by Alisa Solomon. The remorseful Yelaja called Solomon to apologize.
On the heels of March's surge in job creation, a series of media-company financial reports in recent days indicate that help-wanted pages in newspapers are swelling again, further sign that the labor market has turned the corner.
Afefe Tyehimba of Baltimore City Paper profiles the ongoing struggles of Danielle, a former prostitute and recovering drug addict. In this second installment of a two-part series, Danielle recalls the circumstances that have led her to relapse on more than one occasion. Despite strong support from family and friends, Danielle, like so many refugees from the world of street hustling, has found maintaining normalcy even more of a painful challenge than attaining it.
Amy Jenniges, a reporter for The Stranger, was denied a marriage license to legalize her relationship with her longtime lesbian partner. To make a point about the so-called sanctity of marriage, Jenniges' gay editor, Dan Savage, asked if he could get a license to marry her. Because the two met the man-woman criterion, the King County Clerk's office granted the license. Savage told Matt Markovich of KOMO 4 News in Seattle that he and the woman he doesn't love planned to stay married just 55 hours and 10 minutes in order to best Britney Spears.
Oubai Shahbandar has upset some people at Arizona State University in Tempe by posting names and photos of professors on a Web page titled "The Socialist Professor of the Month." He called his campus chapter of the Muslim Students Association "Taliban in training" and wrote a guest column for the Arizona Republic accusing the association and another organization of being out to destroy the U.S. Joe Watson of Phoenix New Times profiles the ambitious, provocative 22-year-old student and explores his ties with leading white conservatives.
