Men Nguyen is a seven-card poker stud with 20 Visa cards at his disposal and a half-dozen lock-boxes containing hundreds of thousands of dollars. He travels with a band of adoring cardsharp proteges, fellow Vietnamese refugees, who tithe a percentage of their winnings to him while reverently calling him “Master.” LA Weekly's Michael Kaplan follows Nguyen into his tight-knit Vietnamese community and the world of high-stakes poker.
Joe Sullivan, publisher of Metro Pulse for 10 years, has sold the Knoxville, Tenn., weekly to Brian Conley, a general contractor who has development contracts with the city. Conley, who was briefly a co-owner of the Pulse in the mid-1990s, pledges he will guard the alt-weekly's editorial independence, even as it investigates his own dealings with the city (see story link below). Sullivan stays on as editor in chief and columnist.
"Twin Cities Babelogue" has turned more than 20 writers, editors and freelancers loose on the paper's Web site to talk about anything they want, any way they want. The experiment is paying off so far, with 10 percent of all Web site visitors now checking out the Babelogue during their time on the site. "I figured it was going to be a waste of time and lobbied openly against it," Senior Editor Brad Zellar tells AAN News. "Turns out, however, that I've taken to it."
New Times writers swept the Newspaper Restaurant Review or Critique category of the 2003 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards with Jason Sheehan of Westword winning, while Jill Posey-Smith of Riverfront Times and Robb Walsh of Houston Press were finalists. Mark Stuertz of the Dallas Observer was the winner in the Newspaper, Magazine or Internet Reporting on Consumer Issues, Nutrition and/or Health category for his article “Green Giant." Dara Moskowitz, City Pages (Twin Cities) and Walsh were finalists in the newspaper series category.
In these days of Lebron James hysteria, it's easy to forget that high-schooler-hype isn't exactly a new phenomenon. Actually, it dates back to 1973, when Texas schoolboy David Clyde became the first baseball player to go directly from high school to the Major Leagues. Clyde flamed out in spectacular fashion, playing bits and pieces of eight seasons before blowing out his arm and leaving the game for good. Today he's alive and well and living in Tomball, Texas. And, as Dallas Observer sports columnist John Gonzalez reports, he'd like a little bit of his life back.
Eight young people talk with Pittsburgh City Paper over a couple cases of beer. "We turned on a tape recorder but kept our pie holes shut, asking one participant, Oscar Lehman, to act as moderator. (Well, we didn’t just sit there -- we kept their frosty mugs filled with pale ale and quaffed a few ourselves!)" Thing is, the interviewees were role-playing CP staffers, but the joke may not have been on readers. "The efforts of Pittsburgh’s self-appointed youth-retention and regional-marketing experts are so utterly inane, self-indulgent and classist, that it’s hard to make a joke about them," Editor Andy Newman writes.
