Danny Bakewell's libel suit against New Times Los Angeles' columnists Rick Barrs (also the paper's editor) and Jill Stewart backfired. Stewart calls Bakewell "a multimillionaire developer and obnoxious black nationalist," as well as a "poverty pimp" for using money collected by the Brotherhood Crusade, ostensibly a charity, for his personal enrichment. The judge saw nothing wrong with using this term to describe Bakewell and ordered him to pay $25,000 to the alternative newsweekly.
Pittsburgh City Paper has hired Brentin Mock, a graduate of the Academy for Alternative Journalism at Medill. Each summer 10 minority journalism students go through the eight-week residential program, learning long-form feature writing with the alt-edge. Mike Lenehan, executive editor of the Chicago Reader and one of the founders of the Academy, says right now he's happy if one or two of its graduates are snapped up by alts. In the meantime, the Academy, which is funded by grants from AAN and its publishers, is building "a small army of future writers," Lenehan says.
Dan Perkins, who pens the cartoon "This Modern World" as Tom Tomorrow, says he and Michael Moore are teaming up on an animated feature film. "It will be a fictional, satirical narrative film, the look of which will be based on my work," Perkins says in a news release. He and Moore have been working on the screenplay since last October and expect to start pre-production in a few months.
"How do white people learn what to think about race? It's best not to think about it." That's the conclusion Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer comes to after delving into his own childhood and adolescent memories of growing up in the South. He worked months on this story after being challenged by an author who said black writers are always expected to write very personally about race, while white writers "always get to lie back a little." No more. Schutze went deep and came up with some weird and uncomfortable memories.
It's build a home, go to jail for Julio Sandoval and Beatriz Chavez, who face possible five-year prison terms for helping to house the poor in Baja California. But Mexican officials don't even enforce their own rulings when the culprit is Duro Bag, which illegally fired workers trying to form an independent union. LA Weekly's David Bacon reports that the common thread is a system that looks after Mexico's rich as well as foreign investors. And President Bush wants to expand this free-trade reality across the entire hemisphere.
