The low-income residents who relied on Wayne County's taxpayer-funded health plan found that medical help was too often not forthcoming. Metro Times news editor Curt Guyette studies the dilemma of patients who were supposed to get service through a health maintenance organization but couldn't find doctors who would treat them. One woman begged doctors for six months to take out the drainage tubes that were supposed to be surgically removed a few days after an emergency kidney operation, but no one would do it until the governor's office intervened.
Backers of a new model hope to tap one of the last ad-free frontiers of the Internet -- the text of articles and message boards -- in what they bill as the ultimate contextual advertising play. Industry watchers question whether the new form of pop-up ads will be tolerated by online readers. But the IntelliTXT system, which rolls out today, is drawing the ire of journalists and others who say it not only blurs the line between advertising and editorial, it erases it.
After a student made harsh remarks about homosexuals in a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill class, lecturer Elyse Crystall apologized to her students by e-mail. Now the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is looking into whether Crystall's message, which referred to "white heterosexual Christian male" privilege, constitutes harassment. Independent Weekly writer Barbara Solow explores this and other campus incidents in which, she writes, "a well-financed conservative machine" battles what it considers "liberal orthodoxy" in higher education.
Presidential-election years typically mean choppy waters for advertisers, but this year's race is shaping up to be more like a perfect storm. The candidates' hefty war chests, the ferociousness of their attacks so early in the season, and the strategic media plans that concentrate their spending in 17 battleground states will likely combine to knock many advertisers off the air, according to a memo the American Association of Advertising Agencies plans to issue to its members today.
Media-based advertising, which fended off a threatening shift toward consumer and trade promotion spending during the late 1980s and early 1990s, is once again losing share of marketing budgets. While U.S. ad spending has pulled out of recession and managed to expand at moderate rates, promotional and trade spending have been growing at much faster rates, according to the results of an annual study released last week by the Promotion Marketing Association and PROMO magazine.
A Long Island Press investigation uncovers evidence of dumped papers and other circulation irregularities on the heels of a $100 million federal racketeering lawsuit filed against Newsday, one of the largest dailies in the country. The Press's Christopher Twarowski finds mounds of Newsday circulars decomposing in wetlands behind a distributor's home, discovers piles of apparently unread papers in a town's recycling bins, and interviews shopkeepers who claim the paper credits them for fewer returns than they send back. The plaintiffs' attorney alleges that advertisers "have been ripped off untold amounts."
The Denver weekly's Julie Jargon won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Certificate for her story "The War Within," about two female cadets who were punished and kicked out of the U.S. Air Force Academy after they complained of being raped. IRE judges noted that the article "is a great example of tackling a sensitive story at a powerful institution."
Marty Beckerman was in a Washington, D.C., bookstore in March pushing copies of his new book, "Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace." Mike DeBonis reports on the early success of the 21-year-old American University student. While Beckerman was a summer intern at New York Press in 2002, then editor John Strausbaugh helped him connect with a literary agent. The young author tells Washington City Paper the deal he struck with MTV/Pocket Books should get him through a semester of college.
In March, Indianapolis activist Carl Rising-Moore helped an Army private, Brandon David Hughey, cross the border into Canada after the young man decided to desert rather than serve in what he believes is an illegal war. NUVO's Jim Walker profiles the contemplative, defiant Vietnam War era veteran who has become conductor of the new underground railroad. In an accompanying piece, Becky Oberg describes Hughey's safe passage into Canada, where he was met by the CBC and some Quakers.
