Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen was released late last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sheehan says the book is about "the often wonderful, sometimes terrible things that result from sticking four or five or ten poorly socialized men together for hours at a stretch in a small steel box filled with knives and fire." National Public Radio is just one of the media outlets to have sung the book's praises thus far, including it on its summer nonfiction reading list (and running a lengthy excerpt). "If chefs are the new rock stars, Jason Sheehan is like a grunge guitarist of the old school," John Freeman writes.

Continue ReadingWestword Food Writer’s Book is Released

Lynn Cullen is re-launching her talk show "Lynn Cullen Live" on City Paper's website. The show will stream live each weekday at 10 am and also be archived and downloadable from the site. Cullen left WAMO-AM this spring when the pending sale of WAMO and its sister stations was announced. "When we read about WAMO exiting their format, we thought it might be an interesting concept to have Lynn be a part of our website," City Paper publisher Michael Frischling says.

Continue ReadingLocal Talk Radio Fixture Takes Her Show to Pittsburgh City Paper

Thomas Van Flein issued a four-page letter on Saturday denying there was a brewing scandal behind Palin's decision to resign her gubernatorial office a day earlier. What's more, the statement put the media on notice that the Palin team would file defamation lawsuits against media outlets that repeated allegations about a possible scandal centered around a building contractor with close ties to the Palins. In a footnote, Van Flein points out these "insinuations" were published in the "left wing Village Voice" in an October 2008 story by Wayne Barrett. The piece examined links between Palin and several contractors who worked on a sports complex as part of a deeper look at Palin's previous record. "Van Flein's statement -- which derides 'modern journalism' for 'abhorring' due diligence and factchecking -- is actually longer than the section of the Voice story that examined the connections around the complex," Barrett writes, "but he does not challenge a single fact actually presented in our story."

Continue ReadingSarah Palin’s Attorney Takes a Swing at the Village Voice

"When David Brewster started the Weekly, I thought it was a fabulous idea because Seattle didn't have anything like the New Yorker but it's a rather sophisticated city," Alan Furst told The Stranger in an interview last month. Furst says that when Brewster approached him about writing for the paper, he was told he could write about anything, so he decided he wanted to write a football column. "The Nordstrom family had just bought the franchise for the Seahawks, and they brought in and unwrapped a brand-new team and there I was up in the press box, eating free hot dogs. It was great!"

Continue ReadingNovelist Remembers the Early Days of the Seattle Weekly

That's the impression that BNET's David Weir got at last month's AAN Convention. "As those big guys crumble, it's an opportunity for us," an unnamed publisher tells him. "We know that they are stuck halfway between print and the web. And now they have to figure out what to do about mobile. They have far more resources than we do, but they also are much more bureaucratic."

Continue ReadingAlts ‘More Nimble’ Than Dailies When it Comes to Social Media