Baltimore City Paper's Molly Rath, using juvenile justice documents not usually available to the public, digs deeper into why Maryland's juvenile justice system has failed the state's poor young men. While the dailies have used a lot of ink on stories about the problems with the system, none focused on those most affected, Rath says. “The more I talked to people inside, and critics outside, the system, the more I wanted to get away from them all and talk to kids, and the families,” Rath tells AAN News. Part Two of her Shackled series, nearly a year in the making, tells the story of a boy who entered the system at 11 and today, at 14, is still there, arguably worse off than when he entered.
In a case against two Connecticut Tribune Co. papers, The Hartford Courant and AAN-member New Haven Advocate, knotty issues of jurisdiction and Web pages are at stake. Editor & Publisher examines the "long-arm statute" case involving coverage of housing Connecticut prisoners in Virginia jails and whether the two papers libeled a Virginia prison warden. AAN is one of more than two dozen newspapers and trade associations signing onto an amicus curiae brief in the case.
In just a few months, Enron, the darling of Wall Street, became the dog's ass. Houston Press writers Brian Wallstin and Tim Fleck take the implosion apart piece by piece. "Enron used political ties to rid itself of regulators. But in the end, its supposed free-market trailblazing only burned investors," they write.
Laurie Anderson was once called a sellout for signing with Warner Bros. and bringing her art world aesthetic to the mainstream. Twenty years later, Brian Eno creates sounds for Microsoft, Mario Cuomo hawks Doritos, and it's Anderson who is refusing the Absolut ads. As she gets set to introduce her new performance work, Happiness, to Los Angeles audiences, Anderson talks with LA Weekly's Judith Lewis about pop culture, fast food, Sept. 11 and the virtues of useless art.
With a terse note, Philadelphia City Paper kills its serialized novel, Transit of Venus by Anonymous D, because the local Fox affiliate threatened a lawsuit. The novel about a young woman's experiences as a TV news neophyte apparently cut too close to the Fox bone. The chapters published to date have been removed from the newspapers' Web site.
