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."
Dallas Observer Editor Julie Lyons goes in search of a young woman who survived one of the most horrific crimes in Dallas history and finds a still youthful woman with clear brown eyes who remembers nothing. Lyons finds all the survivors and two of the gunmen in the "bathtub shooting" -- five teenagers shoved into a bathtub with the water running and peppered with dozens of .45 caliber rounds. Because Lizzie Williams played dead, miraculously four of them survived. The crime was the emotional peak of a virtual war over the crack trade in South Dallas, now a fading memory.
A subsidiary of the Erie, Pa. company, formed in March to invest in alternative newspapers and headed by Art Howe, acquires Louisville's alt-weekly only months after its purchase of Cleveland Free Times. Pam Brooks, a longtime Louisville resident and publishing executive, is the new publisher, replacing Blanche Kitchen Brewer, who is retiring. "It was time," explains LEO Executive Editor and co-founder John Yarmuth. "My concern is the best interest of this paper, and it supersedes all personal agendas."
A recent report by the U.S. Justice Department's Inspector General may energize an effort to bring top U.S. law enforcement officials to justice for the systematic sweep of hundreds of Arab and Muslim immigrants into detention after Sept.11, Chisun Lee reports in The Village Voice. Some of these former detainees are now suing U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and others for a host of civil rights violations. "In numerous cases, people not accused of any crime were locked down 23 hours a day, sometimes in solitary confinement, and shackled at the wrists, waist, and ankles when outside their cells," Lee writes. "Some detainees reported afterward that they had been slammed into walls, kicked, and subjected to petty torments like constant bright light during sleeping hours and deprivation of toilet paper and soap."
