Publisher Mark Bartel of City Pages (Twin Cities) has fired Editor Tom Finkel because they disagreed on whether the paper should change direction, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Finkel came to City Pages in 1997 from Miami New Times. "I don't want to play this like Tom and I have been butting heads for 4 1/2 years; I really like Tom," Bartel tells the daily. "I just felt like I wanted the editorial to take more chances, to be edgier."
Most people work out their gender identification as toddlers. Others don't. Leyla Kokmen of City Pages (Twin Cities) explores the world of transgendered people, those who don't fit in a culture that has only two pronouns -- he and she. "Do you really think I'd choose to go this way?" former drag queen Morgan O'Sullivan laments. "It's not fun. I wish I had been born a female. It would have been a lot less painful." As Kokmen details, the transition from one gender to the other, or even stopping somewhere in between, is a tortured process that ultimately brings peace to most who make the switch.
Friends and associates described him as a vampire: nocturnal, with a passing resemblance to Nosferatu, and a thirst for the party drug GHB, which he drank like blood. But "English Shaun" also was a keen businessman, a British stockbroker who now stands accused of masterminding the ecstasy-based drug ring that fueled the Phoenix rave scene of the 1990s. Before it fell apart in a haze of addiction, paranoia and competition from mobster Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, Shaun's empire reportedly grew to include scores of rave kids, some of them kept in company-funded apartments, where they rested up between sales runs. Phoenix New Times reporters Susy Buchanan and Brendan Joel Kelley chronicle the tale of drugs, sex, and money.
"That we keep finding incompetence at The Tennessean is apparently no longer news," says Editor Bruce Dobie, telling the Scene's readers that 13 years of "Desperately Seeking the News" is enough. The column had become "far too formulaic and predictable," Dobie complains. "Bruce is wrong, as editors often are," argues media columnist Henry Walker, who nevertheless is forced to admit, "What the editor giveth, He can taketh away."
The vast majority of the 15,000 porn titles released in the U.S. every year are amateur productions. Gonzo, anal, oral, facial, gangbang, bukkake, black-on-black, interracial, all-Asian, girl-on-girl, compilation tapes, Internet sites -- the sheer size of America's amateur pornopalooza is overwhelming. To get a closer look, The Stranger's Bradley Steinbacher spends a few hours in a hotel room watching amateur porn entreprenuer Jeff Harder shoot his latest feature.
Betty Brink claims the AAN-member paper hired Pulitzer-winning former Dallas Morning News reporter Dan Malone at a salary exceeding her own by over 50%. The Dallas Observer reports that Brink -- at 70 perhaps the oldest working journalist in the alternative newspaper business -- has filed a complaint with the EEOC, alleging age and gender discrimination.
It's a new sociological phenomenon: Increasing numbers of gay teenagers are proclaiming their homosexuality at an early age. Douglas Sadownick of LA Weekly talks to several gays who came out early to learn how a growing child ultimately decides to choose loyalty to his or her unfolding queer feelings over affiliation to family, religion, friends, and their own internalized homophobia.
"It's a newspaper advertising category that for decades has been owned lock, stock, and fur-lined handcuffs by alternative papers," reports Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald. "But now increasing numbers of daily newspapers are coyly succumbing to the many seductions of sex ads." Don't provide a sales rep, jack up the rates, slap restrictions on the ads -- despite these barriers, adult sections in most alternatives still grow like kudzu. Daily papers are beginning to take notice.
