The documents in question were held by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, the same outfit involved in the secret grand jury kerfuffle that led to the arrests of Village Voice Media executives Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey and, ultimately, to the humiliation of county attorney Andrew Thomas and special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik. New Times originally sought the documents in May 2004; MCSO released them five months later, after New Times was forced to file suit. On Tuesday, the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed a lower court's ruling, finding that MCSO "wrongfully denied New Times access to public records." The Court of Appeals sent the case back to superior court "for a further determination on the issue of attorney's fees." In the Arizona Republic, the Sheriff's deputy chief admitted that the officer responsible for complying with public-records requests "was truly afraid of the (New Times) reporter, that there was a genuine personal joint vendetta between the two of them."
With the testimony of San Francisco Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce Brugmann concluded, drama in the courtroom subsided on Wednesday as Guardian attorneys read depositions from VVM chief financial officer Jed Brunst and former SF Weekly publisher Chris Keating. The SF Weekly's dispatch is here, and the Bay Guardian's take is here.
"There’s no end to President Bush’s slyness in subverting new Congressional law and clinging to the secrecy that has been the administration’s executive cloak," says the New York Times today in an editorial decrying the budgetary legerdemain Bush used to gut a key provision of the recently passed OPEN Government Act. The Washington Examiner editorial page weighs in on the controversy as well.
City Paper art director Joe MacLeod narrates a short video shot during the paper's recent party at G-Spot, a local art gallery displaying large blow-ups of pages and covers published during the last three decades by Baltimore's finest alt-weekly. "Each page is sort of like a piece of artwork," says MacLeod, who laments the fact that the "archetypal alt-weekly-style feature ... it has that certain look ... it's all kinda going away because of digital. ... That kind of classic alt-weekly look is disappearing." Not that he cares, of course.
Although their dispatches read as if they're reporting from two different trials, both SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian agree that the temperature in the courtroom rose on Tuesday when the Bay Guardian's editor and publisher, Bruce Brugmann, took the stand. According to VVM's Andy Van De Voorde, Brugmann "exploded on the stand ... pounding his hand on the witness box, raising his voice, and growing red-faced." But Bay Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond says his boss "stood up remarkably well under a cross-examination" and "generally made the SF Weekly's lawyer look silly." The Bay Guardian filed a more extensive report on the trial here, while SF Weekly posted dispatches following the action on Friday and Monday.
In its FY09 budget proposal released earlier this week, the Bush Administration transfered to the Justice Department the Freedom of Information Act ombudsman position recently created by an act of Congress. The Bureau of National Affairs (subscription only) reports today that Justice failed to meet its own FOIA backlog reduction goal of 15 percent for 2007. "This should never happen, especially at the department that is responsible for reviewing other agency annual FOIA reports for accuracy," a former Justice official told BNA. The Justice Department currently provides guidance to federal agencies on FOIA compliance and also has a role in defending agencies against challenges to FOIA denials. Critics of the administration's proposal contend that because of its role in defending FOIA challenges, Justice lacks the neutrality to handle the new ombudsman function. More on the controversy from the Washington Post, the Ocala Star-Banner and Scripps Howard News Service.
Duane Swierczynski will be leaving this year's AAN convention-host paper later this month to focus on his other life as an author of crime novels and other books, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. The City Paper has confirmed that senior editor Brian Howard will replace Swierczynski as the alt-weekly's editor-in-chief.
More than 190 people attended the Web Publishing Conference and 288 attended AAN West last week as AAN members descended on the Hotel Kabuki and the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco for several days of education, networking and fun. Post-conference surveys for both events will be circulated later this week. In addition, Powerpoint presentations featured at the conferences will soon be uploaded to the AAN Resource Library.
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