AAN News
Owner of Small Newspaper Chain Denies Plagiarizingnew
Tom Picou (pictured), president,
chairman, and CEO of the company that
owns the Tri-State Defender in Memphis,
warns Chicago Reader's Michael
Miner to be objective about reports of
plagiarism at the paper or "I will not
hesitate to come after you." Several
former employees say Picou himself was
Larry Reeves, the mysterious unpaid
freelance writer who lifted stories
from AAN papers coast to coast, including
the Reader. Picou calls the reports about
the Defender's plagiarism "bullshit" and
says he never even read Reeves' stories.
"I just laid them out. And that was
my job."
Chicago Reader |
05-27-2003 1:48 pm |
Industry News
Cleveland Free Times Reemerges After Long Absence
The first alternative newspaper in history
to be spawned by an antitrust
settlement hit the streets last week
exploding with entrepreneurial energy
and vitriol directed at its main competitor,
Cleveland Scene. Debuting with
a summer-special issue weighing in at
112 pages, the new Cleveland Free
Times unleashed a fusillade of
name-calling and planted the flag of
"local" ownership even though all but a
sliver of the paper is owned by Times
Publishing of Erie, Pa.
(FULL STORY)
AAN Staff |
05-27-2003 10:16 am |
Industry News
Tags: Management, Cleveland Free Times
Board Candidates Announced
AAN Staff |
05-27-2003 5:13 pm |
Association News
Terrorism "Expert" Drops Case Against Weekly Planetnew
Steven Emerson, who promotes himself as an investigative reporter with special knowledge of radical Islamic terrorists, has abandoned his four-year-old libel suit against the Weekly Planet and former Editor John Sugg. In a 1998 article, Sugg, now a senior editor at Creative Loafing (Atlanta), questioned Emerson's assertions about terrorist plots against him. Emerson sued, saying the articles defamed him. "Emerson never had a case," Planet Publisher Ben Eason says.
Weekly Planet (Tampa) |
05-23-2003 1:06 pm |
Industry News
Tags: Creative Loafing (Tampa)
Local Planet Weekly Charges Competitor with Content Co-Optationnew
The "wacko, ultra-paranoid neurotics" at Spokane's newer, smaller alt-weekly admit that "they whine more than anyone in town." But that doesn't stop the folks at Local Planet Weekly from issuing a warning: "(W)hen you fuck with our ideas, we're going to go psycho on your ass." And psycho they went when they picked up last week's issue of Pacific Northwest Inlander and found that the cover story, "The State of Radio," employed the same title that LPW had previously used for an award-winning series.
Local Planet Weekly |
05-23-2003 12:34 pm |
Industry News
Tags: Editorial
New Times Columnist Outs Gay Republican, Causes a Stirnew
New Times Broward-Palm Beach columnist Bob Norman ignited the Internet last week when he revealed what is already common knowledge among "political and media types": That Palm Beach County Republican Congressman Mark Foley (see photo) is gay. The column was immediately posted on at least 20 Web sites, and the story was then picked up by gay newspapers and received a mention in Hotline, a popular inside-the-beltway political fixation. Now even mainstream local papers like the Sun-Sentinel appear to be closing in.
New Times Broward-Palm Beach |
05-23-2003 11:16 am |
Industry News
Is Social Therapy a Cult?new
Two years ago, Erika Van Meir thought social therapy could change the world. Today, she calls it a cult. Creative Loafing's Steve Fennessy talks with Van Meir about her experiences with the movement founded by Fred Newman, a Marxist and one-time Lyndon LaRouche ally, who terms modern psychology "a fraud." Others in the field, while tolerant of off-beat therapy approaches, call Newman's brand "complete gobbledygook."
AAJ Fellows Named
AAN Staff |
05-23-2003 5:53 pm |
Association News
Cowboy Ministries Round Them Sinners Upnew
Noel Black heads to cowboy church, one of the fastest-growing religious phenomena in the world. "God showed me cowboys hung up on bulls with fire beneath them," Glenn Smith, who founded a cowboy ministry after this vision, tells Black. "He said they were dying and going to hell. [He told me the] next morning I was to sell all my worldly possessions and he would provide for me to minister to cowboys. So I did."
Even Alts Have Had Their Blair-esque Momentsnew
In a column on both mainstream and alternative media's tangles with plagiarism, Westword's Michael Roberts reveals a couple of AAN member papers' own most embarrassing moments. One is a case where Boulder Weekly had to apologize to Salt Lake City Weekly about publishing a barely rewritten story, and a couple of times Westword's writers deviated from the truth.
Westword |
05-22-2003 9:58 am |
Industry News
Pedophilia and "Repressed" Memory on Long Islandnew
Arnold Friedman, the subject of
Andrew Jarecki’s award-winning
documentary "Capturing the Friedmans,"
was a pedophile, but did he molest
children? Friend of the family Debbie
Nathan revisits the case and
explores the nature of pedophilia and
memory. She takes us inside the family
through son David, a/k/a Silly Billy, the
city's most famous children's birthday
party clown. Silly Billy has been
featured in fluffy articles and numbers
celebrities like Susan Sarandon among
his clients. "But there are things about his
family's past that are not fluffy at all,"
Nathan writes.
