With another fire season looming in the American West, Montana Governor Judy Martz hopes to get a jump on the flames by hosting the Western Governors' Association in Missoula, which is being billed as a Healthy Forest Summit. "The purpose of the Summit," the WGA has announced, "is to accelerate locally driven projects that will prevent catastrophic wildfires by reducing fuel loads and restoring lands." In other words, Missoula will this weekend play host to to an official pep rally of support for President George W. Bush's latest bout with resource policy doublespeak. To prepare, Missoula Independent devotes its entire issue to the theme of fire, including instructions for turning this week's newpaper into a flaming fire kite. Burn, baby, burn.
Donald Bren, a developer and GOP stalwart in Southern California, is on both Forbes' list of wealthiest Americans and OC Weekly's list of "scariest" Orange Countians. Despite OC Weekly's frequent exposes of Bren's “shenanigans,†his company was a regular advertiser until a few weeks ago, when it yanked ads worth about $120,000 a year. "Our crime? We’d forgotten to adhere to Bren’s prime directive: thou shalt not publicly discuss the actions of my wandering penis," R. Scott Moxley writes.
Howard Altman, editor of Philadelphia City Paper, takes off on Pittsburgh's new baseball park and that City Paper's luxury suite, the tensions between "New Timesers and Voiceniks" and the new owners of Cleveland Free Times, and what the association should look like in the future. "Working at an alternative, I know that the thrust of [Neal Pollack's awards luncheon] punch lines -- that we are verging on the old and irrelevant -- is something we should be keenly aware of."
Here's a look at the 2004 annual convention by the numbers -- from attendance to admissions, parties to pierogies, board members to brouhahas. The consensus seems to be that Pittsburgh surprised and delighted AAN.
A new Pew Report adds to a mounting pile of evidence that the oceans are dying. Andrew Scutro looks at the report and talks to experts about how quickly and how catastrophically humans can damage ocean life, from pollution to overfishing. "It's going to be a war," Dr. Jeremy Jackson, director of the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, tells Scutro. "We always do these things, but if we do them late the consequences could be vastly worse than if we'd done them on time."
The owners of the Long Island Press, one of the seven applying papers voted into the association at the Pittsburgh convention, "have begun plotting how to take the paper daily to compete with Newsday," reports the New York Post. Jed Morey, CEO of the paper's parent company, the Morey Organization, which also owns three radio stations on Long Island, tells the Post: "We consider the weekly a trial balloon. The size of this market lends itself to two dailies."
So says New Times Broward-Palm Beach's Bob Norman, who had hoped that his column last month outing South Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley (pictured in photo) "would do some good." But things "spiraled out of control," says Norman, after Foley said he wouldn't talk about his sexual orientation and denounced Norman's story and "rumors" about him as "revolting and unforgivable." According to Norman, the mainstream media coverage that followed reduced the debate "to a realpolitikal show, a grand distraction."
The national media "repeatedly scooped" The Plain Dealer on the New Times-Village Voice Media antitrust story that was brewing "in its own backyard," says Free Times' Michael Gill."I didn't have any trouble selling (the story) upper right on the front page of the business section on a Monday," the New York Times' David Carr tells Gill, "and that's tough space to get." Commenting on the government's role in the antitrust investigation that led to the story, Carr also says, "I wish they'd aim that gun at some bigger game."
