Battered for three years by a severe ad drought, Madison Avenue may finally have something to celebrate. Advertising spending in the U.S. jumped 6.8% in the first half of 2003, buoyed by increased ad outlays from packaged goods, automotive and entertainment companies, according to a new industry study.
Hollywood will win the war against illegal downloading but the battlefield will be littered with casualties, including the DVD and CD formats as physical means of distributing video and audio, according to a Forrester Research study.
“I hadn’t done investigative reporting before and now I’m definitely interested in it,” Porochista Khakpour, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins master’s program in writing, tells Medill News. Khakpour and nine other students recently concluded the residential summer program at Medill’s Academy for Alternative Journalism, where they completed stories ranging from "what happens to the wrongfully convicted to tracking a female urban explorer to investigating a skydiving company with a high mortality rate."
The Village Voice's Rick Perlstein scours Orange County in vain for anyone who loves Gov. Gray Davis. He finds plenty who hate him, though. A woman in a gated community who shreds her mail so illegal immigrants can't steal her identity. Surfing teenagers who detest the car tax. A congressman who deplores the Chinatowns springing up across the state and "exploding in population." And a grassroots organizer who sums up the recall initiative: "We found an opponent with a really weak hand; we just kept raising and raising the stakes."
John Yewell (pictured) was fired last month for unspecified reasons and replaced for the interim by Managing Editor Ben Fulton. "I'll be carefully vague ... there were differences," Publisher John Saltas tells the Deseret News. According to the daily, "Some of the paper's freelance writers heaved a sigh of relief on hearing the news that Yewell was let go." Before taking the position in Salt Lake City, Yewell had been fired as editor of Independent Weekly.
In Texas, history has a way of repeating itself. Jake Bernstein and Dave Mann of The Texas Observer reveal how last year a small group of politicians and corporations bought themselves a legislature and poured hundreds of millions back into the pockets of the corporations. The no-holds-barred campaign was run through the Texas Association of Business and U.S. House Whip Tom Delay's Texans for a Republican Majority. Both entities took a calculated risk, which paid off with the first Republican Texas legislature in 130 years, but both are now under investigation.
In an apparent effort to stop the public from reading an article about his unsavory past, Tim Yousik, currently running in the Republican primary for Riverhead town supervisor, marched into Town Hall and removed all copies of the Long Island Press' Aug. 14 issue, witnesses say. Yousik was apparently attempting to make disappear the cover story on his dirty past: a 1987 conviction for third-degree sodomy and endangering the welfare of a minor in upstate New York.
