The Nashville Scene and the San Francisco Bay Guardian snag nearly a dozen awards in the National Newspaper Association's Better Newspaper Contest. NNA will recognize the winners in all 125 categories at its 116th annual convention in September.
After playing the Village Voice's Siren Music Festival with his band, Jazz Beard Jr., R. James Bagget says he was shocked at Amy Phillips' "sarcastic tone and lack of genuine enthusiasm" in her preview of the event that was published in the Voice. "(I)t is profoundly ironic that one of the Voice's main competitors (Time Out) ran a much larger and more laudatory preview," he writes in his letter-to-the-editor.
In a New Times LA exclusive, Susan Goldsmith obtains chilling court-sealed FBI documents that have never seen the light of day until this week’s edition of the alternative newsweekly. Using internal FBI reports and transcribed recordings made by FBI informants and agents in meetings with members of the Mexican Mafia, Goldsmith’s 6500-word story of mob violence questions why the FBI failed to make arrests with such ample evidence of conspiracy to commit murder.
Stay tuned this fall for a good read in the Chicago Reader. A federal judge ordered the city to release "five banker's boxes" of confidential police documents to the alternative newsweekly by August 30. The materials were sealed after the city settled a lawsuit filed by a woman who accused a police officer of rape. In an e-mail to AAN News, Reader Editor Alison True reports that in his written opinion (Download PDF Here), U.S. District Court Judge Ruben Castillo "commended" the Reader and reporter Tori Marlan "for their thorough investigative reporting and ongoing pursuit of truth in these types of misconduct cases."
Jerry Klein, a columnist for Creative Loafing Charlotte, writes his last column, laying bare his search for spiritual solace after having been "basically leveled, flattened" by fate. He’s moving on after exactly 365 columns and hopes it will be a Great Adventure.
