David Schneiderman, CEO of Village Voice Media, wants to move LA Weekly/OC Weekly into "a larger media world in terms of advertising," he tells AAN News. He says asking Michael Sigman to resign as president and publisher last week was "not fun" and says the decision to cut the 20-year veteran loose was not driven by VVM investors. "My goal is to bring in as much revenue as possible so that I can keep putting money back into editorial and grow the editorial quality," he says.
AAN, along with more than two dozen other media companies and organizations, has joined an Amicus Curiae brief, filed Jan. 23 in federal court in Virginia. The case involves news coverage of the housing of Connecticut inmates in Virginia prisons and whether a newspaper’s Web site opens it to jurisdiction in distant states.
AAN Attorney Alice Neff Lucan looks at efforts by many state legislatures to roll back Sunshine Laws. Her conclusion is that these laws and legislative efforts are troubling but not yet the end of Freedom of Information as we know it. Her advice: ask who's been requesting government information and being denied, then publish that information. "If you don't tell them about access, how is anyone to know or care?" she asks.
Rose Farley of the Dallas Observer tells the riveting story of Murdine "Baby Ruth" Berry, who fought a years-long legal battle to get back the bulk of the 100 acres her great-grandfather, a freed slave, paid a couple of bales of cotton to possess. Farley details not only Berry's long struggle to keep possession of the family farm, but the emotional scars it left on her. "If they think I'm going anywhere, I'm not going anywhere," Berry tells the Observer. "I'll stay here. I don't intend to give it up. I'm a fighting monster."
