U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton this week dismissed some, but not all, of a suit filed in April over the arrests of New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin last year. Bolton dismissed the allegations of racketeering and negligence against special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in addition to dismissing County Attorney Andrew Thomas entirely as a defendant, New Times reports. However, she left claims of gross negligence, malicious prosecution, and false arrest and imprisonment to be handled by Superior Court, unless facts presented in an amended complaint persuade her otherwise (New Times has until Oct. 31 to file such a complaint). Saying that Bolton's ruling "is not a surprise," Lacey writes in a blog post that "her ruling in the current case is consistent with her scant regard for the First Amendment and the rights of a free press."
Joe Glisson, who has been New Times' political cartoonist for 25 years, is celebrating with a new retrospective book, Seems Like Old Times. "I had done the first book [1986's Dome Sweet Dome] a number of years ago, and I thought that I would like to have a companion to it," he says. "And this is the 25th year that I've been doing this, so I thought it was an appropriate time to do a retrospective. I don't know if anybody else feels that way, but I wanted to do it." Read more from Glisson in a Q&A posted at AltWeeklies.com.
The Jacksonville, Fla., alt-weekly first requested a document related to the city's NFL team, the Jaguars, in March 2004. The city initially told Folio that it did not possess the document the paper was requesting, a claim it made repeatedly over the next three years in regards to other football-related documents. Only after the paper spent more than $9,000 on an attorney and threatened legal action did the city finally admit it actually did have the requested documents. Turns out Jacksonville had 25 boxes worth of documents related to the football stadium renovations and the city's bid to host the Super Bowl. "Our quest to obtain the records ended with a small victory -- the city provided many documents and repaid $5,000 of our legal fees," writes Folio's Marvin Edwards. "But it also highlighted the city's contempt for public records laws, and its utter lack of accountability."
Facing a tough economic climate, two AAN members had to lay off several employees last week. The Las Vegas Weekly let go "a writer and an art staffer," as part of larger staff reductions by parent company Greenspun Media Group, the Las-Vegas Review-Journal reports. In addition, The Village Voice laid off two staff writers and a deputy copy chief, according to Pop + Politics.
New Times filed a complaint in Maricopa County Court on Monday, asking that a judge order Sheriff Joe Arpaio to hand over public records that his office has refused to produce despite public records requests. The paper says the records include video footage of the final moments of an Juan Mendoza Farias' life. Farias, an inmate, died last December after an altercation with 11 jail guards, as the paper reported last month. New Times first filed a request for the video in July, but the paper has been stonewalled. The suit alleges that the withholding "is without merit, speculative, made in bad faith and insufficient as a matter of law to avoid compliance with the Arizona Public Records Law." The sheriff has 20 days to file a legal explanation for not releasing the records.
In the sixth installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, OC Weekly staffer and ¡Ask a Mexican! columnist Gustavo Arellano discusses his column, which for the second time in three years won a first-place AltWeekly Award. He also talks to Elena Brown about getting hate mail, the immigration debate, and what he likes about writing for alt-weeklies. "At a daily newspaper, they ask you to do one thing and one thing only. I'd get so bored so fast I'd quit my job," Arellano says. "Here, I could write about anything, so long as it's good. That freedom is so intoxicating I can't see why anybody would not want a job like mine."
In a conversation with D.C.-area public radio host Kojo Nnamdi about "the changing face of City Paper," Erik Wemple says that "perhaps a little too much has been made of" his previous comments on the fate of long-form narrative pieces in the paper. Those stories are "an incredible abyss of work," he says. "We could not really sustain that sort of investment, while at the same time feeding the website." However, he adds, "it's not as if we will stop doing long narrative altogether," it will just be less often. He also notes that long-form narratives often don't generate much web traffic, and that Creative Loafing has made the web a priority. "If we don't come up with models that push web traffic, we are dead, and I am out of a job," Wemple says.
The Scene and staff writer P.J. Tobia were hit Wednesday with a defamation suit filed by a former stripper in response to a story published last October, the Nashville City Paper reports. Scene parent company City Press LLC, which is owned by Village Voice Media, was also named in the suit. Michelle Peacock alleges that Tobia's representation of her in the article resulted in injury to her character and reputation, and she's seeking at least $25,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. In the story, Tobia cited a police report that stated Peacock twice "offered to manually stimulate (an undercover cop) until ejaculation for $100 U.S. Dollars." According to the suit, Peacock "continues to suffer a diminution in her earnings and earning capacity" since the strip club refused to allow her to continue working there after the Scene story was published.
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