In a column on both mainstream and alternative media's tangles with plagiarism, Westword's Michael Roberts reveals a couple of AAN member papers' own most embarrassing moments. One is a case where Boulder Weekly had to apologize to Salt Lake City Weekly about publishing a barely rewritten story, and a couple of times Westword's writers deviated from the truth.
Arnold Friedman, the subject of Andrew Jarecki’s award-winning documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," was a pedophile, but did he molest children? Friend of the family Debbie Nathan revisits the case and explores the nature of pedophilia and memory. She takes us inside the family through son David, a/k/a Silly Billy, the city's most famous children's birthday party clown. Silly Billy has been featured in fluffy articles and numbers celebrities like Susan Sarandon among his clients. "But there are things about his family's past that are not fluffy at all," Nathan writes.
Match.com and People2People/Tele-Publishing International, two of the biggest operators in online and voice personals, are coming together to offer users "a robust pool of potential dates and romantic partners," the two companies announced in a joint news release today. P2P/TPI, owned by Phoenix Media Communications Group, is the largest provider of voice personals. Match.com is a global provider of Internet personals. The two together will now have more than 1,000 media clients and reach millions of singles searching for romance.
AAN member papers report that once again classified advertising sales, especially real estate and rental, are keeping overall revenues steady. At the two alternative newsweekly industry national ad sales networks, AWN and Ruxton, sales are running well ahead of last year’s first quarter, but that was one of the worst quarters on record for the industry. “Normally I’d be excited about 20 percent growth,†Michele Laven, president and COO of New Times’ Ruxton Group tells AAN News. “We have a long way to go.â€
Expatriate Iraqis talk with Baltimore City Paper's Tom Chalkley about life under -- and after -- Saddam Hussein, about fear, torture, repression and eventually flight. Now they express the fears of many that Saddam is still alive and plotting return to power. "Even if you find his body, you still don't know," one expat Iraqi tells Chalkley. "Even if I killed him with my own hands, I wouldn't know if he's dead or not."
