"'We told you so' is hardly an endearing newspaper motto, let alone the breakfast of champions, but sometimes it's all we little guys have," says Seattle Weekly Editor Knute Berger, explaining why he felt it was necessary to toot his papers' horn for its coverage of mismanagement at the local PBS affiliate. Berger says that when the president of the station was forced to resign last week, the Seattle Times implied that its impending investigation was the reason.
Mohammad al-Madani was born into wealth in Saudi Arabia, where he became immersed at an early age in the extreme Islamist teachings of the Wahhabi sect. But al-Madani didn't end up a jihadi, or even a Muslim. Instead he became a popular college professor, teaching a radical leftist critique of American imperialism at a small community college in Seattle. Sandeep Kaushik traces al-Madani's odyssey and the lessons it holds.
Plagiarism at the Tri-State Defender was much more extensive than previously reported, according to the Memphis Flyer, and it may have been perpetrated by the African-American newspaper's current owner, Tom Picou. Last week, Picou told the Flyer that the fraud was committed by an unpaid freelance writer whom he never met in person. This week his former managing editor says she "would stake [her] life on it" that Picou himself was the plagiarist. Most of the stories were lifted straight from the pages of alternative newspapers owned by New Times and Village Voice Media.
Although characters from comics and graphic novels have never been more prominent in pop-culture consciousness, the comic book audience is graying. Competition from video games, movies and the Internet makes it difficult for comics to compete for 11-year-old attention spans, and publisher policies, cultural preconceptions and unsuitable content have consigned comic-book culture to specialty stores that appeal primarily to 30-something geeks. Scott Renshaw says comic books "have been a gateway drug for a passion for storytelling and for love of reading" and mourns the potential loss of a culture that is in danger of becoming an anthropological footnote.
Jeff Anderson has filed over 200 lawsuits against religious organizations, a majority of them sex-abuse complaints against the Catholic Church. Working in a "litigious blur," this recovering alcoholic has become the go-to guy for both clergy-abuse victims and reporters searching for the big picture on the unfolding scandal. Is he a wisecracking ambulance chaser with a reputation for hunting priests or a tireless champion of the bullied, obsessed with exposing monsters cloaked in piety? David Schimke reports.
Adrian Lano got his first computer, a venerable Commodore 64, at the tender age of six. Somewhere along the line, he developed a twisted, yet oddly romantic, view of electronic etiquette. Today, at age 22, Lano roams the country by Greyhound, flopping in abandoned buildings. But he's never far away from a Kinko's -- and another caper as the "homeless hacker," the criminal mastermind who's cracked corporate Web sites as prestigious as Yahoo!, where he once edited himself into news stories. Lano's always been a friendly pest -- he even helps companies repair the gaping holes through which he's driven his laptop. Nonetheless, he was born to hack, and he tells SF Weekly staff writer Matt Palmquist he's working on his biggest job yet.
