Nannies in New York, often overworked, underpaid, ignored and invisible, are beginning to wake up and rattle their chains. The Village Voice this week examines efforts by Domestic Workers United to organize and lobby for their rights. "It will be the first time in history that the city acknowledges the special burdens of domestic workers and considers reforms to relieve them," reporter Chisun Lee writes.
In an article penned by Executive Editor Tim Redmond, the 35-year-old weekly announces that it has "launched the first stage of a legal offensive to stop" its New Times-owned competitor "from engaging in anticompetitive business practices that may violate federal and state (antitrust) laws." Redmond also details a settled lawsuit in which the Bay Guardian charged a sales rep who had decided to jump ship with secretly downloading over 1,000 pages of sales records and providing them to her then-new employer, SF Weekly.
The Strip and its publisher Brooks Cloud have broken away from Magnolia Media, a partnership that brought together Birmingham Weekly, the Creative Loafing chain, and The Strip of Tuscaloosa, Ala. Cloud moves back to Tuscaloosa, resigning as general manager and ad director of the Weekly. Cloud’s new company, Monkey Media, also published Tuscaloosa Business Ink. “The Strip really needed the attention of an on-site publisher,” Chuck Leishman, publisher of Birmingham Weekly, tells AAN News.
An editor at the Daily Oklahoman and another at AAN-member Oklahoma Gazette lose their jobs after revealing that the daily's weather writer was lifting material from the Internet without attribution, Jim Romenesko writes in Media News Extra! Gazette media columnist Carol Cole exposed the plagiarism after getting tipped by someone at the Oklahoman. She "says she was fired from the Gazette after an argument with her editor over the editing of her column," Romenesko writes. And at the Oklahoman, "fired editor and reporter, Scott Cooper, denies he gave the item to Cole, but he admits he told others he was the source" to make himself feel important. Meanwhile weather writer Gary England says he'll start crediting NASA and others when he uses their material in his stories.
Women recruit their sisters in the name of empowerment, but "dinner circle" pyramids often collapse into criminal charges. Chico News & Review writer Devanie Angel attends one of these psychobabble-soaked "gifting circles" that abound across the country, where those at the "appetizer" level pay $5,000 so that the woman in a "yummy dessert" position gets the $40,000 tax-free payout. "In about 30 cycles, the population of the Earth would be exhausted," Angel writes.
Four writers at AAN newspapers have won awards in the 2001 National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association. They are: Nigel Jaquiss, Willamette Week, first prize in investigative reporting for "The Poisoning of Whitaker"; Margaret Downing, Houston Press, first prize in opinion writing for "But Who's Counting"; Emily Bliss, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, second prize in feature writing for " A Scout for Life"; Mike Mosedale, City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul), special citation for "Take Till It Hurts."
