Eight months after Salt Lake City's alternative paper did a major expose of real estate fraud, the Salt Lake Tribune trotted out the same story and packaged it as original, Shane McCammon writes. An ethics guru tells McCammon, "I think most honorable organizations will give a nod to the original publication” but the Tribune's Terry Orme shrugs it off and says, “We always feel we do it better than other media outlets.”
NUVO's Fran Quigley traveled to an Kenyan hospital as the guest of the Indiana University School of Medicine, which for 14 years has worked with the hospital’s academic partner, Moi University College of Health Sciences. Since the IU-Moi program was first profiled in NUVO in May of 2001, the AIDS pandemic has passed the bubonic plague to become the worst health crisis in human history. The numbers are staggering: In sub-Saharan Africa, there are more than 30 million people infected with HIV, with as many as 6,000 people dying from the disease every day.
For more than 40 years, cadets at the United States Air Force Academy have pledged to abide by a simple code: "We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does." Westword's Julie Jargon talks to some cadets who recently were booted out of the academy just before graduation. They say that simple code is remarkably complex. "They claim that it's a moribund tradition with unevenly applied sanctions -- a fact that academy officials and members of Congress have known for years," Jargon writes.
The Seattle Times has agreed to release the full text of depositions conducted in its lawsuit with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's owner, The Hearst Corp. The Times and Hearst had previously released only excerpts from the transcripts in the dispute over their joint operating agreement. Seattle Weekly yesterday made a court request for the documents. "The important thing is they are going to get released, and everybody's going to be able to have a closer look at how the JOA's been managed," Chuck Taylor, Seattle Weekly's managing editor, told the Post-Intelligencer.
Marc Schultz was grilled by FBI agents acting on a tip from someone who saw the dark, bearded freelance writer reading something "suspicious" in a coffee shop: After retracing his steps, Schultz remembered what he had been reading: a printout of an article from Weekly Planet (Tampa) -- Hal Crowther's "Weapons of Mass Stupidity." "(I)t seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees," Schultz writes.
"Before the Express can work as an advertising vehicle, it must first achieve marginal editorial success," Slate's Jack Shafer says about Washington Post Co.'s "latest strategy to reclaim young AWOL readers." New Times CEO Jim Larkin tells Shafer the Post and other dailies are trying to stem the erosion of their near monopoly that began in the early 60's; San Diego Reader's Howie Rosen suggests the papers have priced themselves out of local markets with their steep advertising rates. Village Voice Media CEO David Schneiderman says the dailies "patronize" young readers, and "then wonder why they don't read their newspapers."
