News

Gov. Mike Huckabee is fuming at journalists for reporting on online wedding registries established for his housewarming, the Democrat-Gazette reports. When he was asked why his wife of 32 years would register for wedding gifts, Huckabee lashed out at the editor of the Arkansas Times, who broke the story on his blog: "I think you let Max Brantley and a blog, a gossip tabloid, create a story for you, and that’s really sad." The incident compounds the already-bad blood between the governor's office and the Little Rock alt-weekly.

When a Chicago man burned himself to death near a busy expressway, initial news reports failed even to provide an identity. But with the help of local musicians, the Reader's Peter Margasak soon determined that the man was Malachi Ritscher, a fixture as a fan and a player on the local jazz scene. On Ritscher's music-focused Web site Margasak unearthed a self-penned obituary and a suicide note that suggested the self-immolation was, at least in part, a protest of the War in Iraq.

Attorneys for a man accused of killing a University of Vermont student have asked a judge to dismiss the charges because an FBI agent wrote an anonymous op-ed piece about the case in the Burlington alt-weekly. Co-publisher and Editor Pamela Polston tells AAN that Seven Days considered posting an explanation online but ultimately decided to "let the controversy play out in the letters-to-the-editor section." The affair triggered a deluge of mail, which can be read here.

Three quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds who read newspaper content targeted to their age group went on to read their hometown papers between the ages of 18 and 24, a Newspaper Association of America Foundation study found.