New Times music guy bashes former freelancer!
Martin Cizmar, the New Times’ music writer, trashes a former longtime NT music contributor in this blog post.
Now, the point of all of this very long post is difficult to follow, because way too much of it has to do with the finer points of the last ten years of history of a band, Alice in Chains, whose artistic and commercial heyday had ended long before.
But it’s kind fun to read nonetheless. Here’s how the jeremiad begins:
I find it hard […]to respect a journalist who gets totally snookered by [guitarist Jerry] Cantrell’s publicity machine. A puff piece in the Arizona Republic advancing Wednesday’s Alice in Chains show at Dodge Theatre seems to suggest former longtime New Times freelancer Dominic Salerno (he employed the pen name “Serene Dominic” at NT) got taken for the proverbial ride.
6:35 PM
More on the Marquee-Hoodlums ticket-fee war
The Republic and the New Times are catching up on the stand Tempe’s Hoodlums record store has taken against Lucky Man Productions, which operates the Marquee rock club. The store, which collected a reasonable $1 for each ticket it sold for Marquee shows, balked when Lucky Man tried to add on an additional $3.
The store’s blistering original statement post here. PHXated’s December story on it here.
The Republic story is here, with a consistent statement from Hoodlum’s co-owner Steve Wiley:
Wiley […] stresses he’s not on an anti-Marquee crusade.
“It’s not a personal thing,” he says. “We’ve had a great relationship with those guys at the Marquee for many years. I’m not against service fees. We charge a one-dollar service fee for carrying the tickets at our store, and everyone is fine with that. But if the Marquee or whoever needs to charge $28 in order to make ends meet, then I’m a businessperson, I don’t have a problem with that. Just make it $28 dollars. But don’t put $25 on the tickets and the Web site and then expect me to collect an extra $3 for you.”
New Times blog post on the issue by Martin Cizmar is here. Besides being late and misinformed, it’s about a tenth as good as the Republic story, which is a little embarrassing.
PHXated’s previous posts on the outlandish ticket fees charged by the Marquee are here.
8:00 PM
Is the Phoenix New Times “facing bankruptcy”? No.
I’m seeing talk on blogs and on twitter that the New Times paper is in financial trouble based on a court case in San Francisco. I think the reports are overstated.
New Times went into SF in 1996 or so, buying a small local weekly and going up against an established paper, the Bay Guardian. The Guardian eventually sued, saying, essentially, that New Times was deliberately selling its ads at a low price to try to put the Guardian out of business. The papers have been locked in a debilitating (and costly) range war for nearly 15 years.
I used to work at SF Weekly but was fired after some editorial disagreements; I find the muddy, unattractive battle between the two papers over the ensuing decade interesting, but won’t bore you with the details.
New Times lost the case, and a $15 million or so judgment has now increased with interest to some $21 million. As you can imagine, the Guardian is saying “Pay us the money” and New Times is saying, “Screw you, we’re appealing.”
You can make the case that New Times’ prospects aren’t good: A jury heard the case and ruled for the Guardian, and a judge doubled the penalties. On the other hand, to a lot of people, the ruling doesn’t make sense. Newspaper advertising is a different commodity than widgets, and I can testify from having worked there that the main plan for success involved putting out a better paper.
Whatever. In any case, after a recent hearing, stories have come out suggesting that New Times was about to be forced to pay or at least post as a bond the entire judgment. Locally, the Espresso Pundit has jumped on it. New Times has posted this response.
(Over the years New Times has bought up most of the major alternative weeklies in the U.S. and ultimately changed its name to Village Voice Media, after its most famous acquisition. Most people in the industry still call it New Times, and the company is run out of the New Times building downtown.)
New Times’ contention is that if the judgment were to be affirmed on appeal, it would in any case be held against the holding company of the San Francisco paper, which the company says doesn’t have much in the way of assets. In other words, it’s saying that its legal structure would prevent the Guardian from collecting its money.
This may all just be a fiercely argued lie, or maybe after the company loses the appeal a judge will say, “Oh, that’s just a financial facade”—I"m not a lawyer. But it’s also true the company lost the case two years ago, and nothing has changed in the years since to make a potential bankruptcy an issue. The hatred of the Guardian inside the company runs so deep that it’s hard to believe the case will be resolved any time soon.
7:00 AM
The Arpaio Follies begin to get some national reviews
Both the LA Times and Talking Points memo have major pieces up on Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, the Dimmer Twins.
The Times story concentrates on the continuing range war between arpaio and his political enemies, with a special focus on just trying to lay out the scope of it all. The thing is 1200 words long and still manages to glide over a lot of Arpaio’s nuttiness.
You don’t hear much about the the tag team legal brutality he engages in with Andrew Thomas, and the the story doesn’t even mention the late-night arrests of the owners of the Phoenix New Times.
The result is long passages like this:
has escalated his tactics in recent months, not only defying the federal government but launching repeated investigations of those who criticize him. He recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure. On Thursday night, the Arizona Court of Appeals issued an emergency order forbidding the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office from searching the home or chambers of a Superior Court judge who was named in the racketeering case.Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office demanded to see Gordon’s e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars.
When the police chief in one suburb complained about the sweeps, Arpaio’s deputies raided that town’s City Hall.
My biggest criticism of the LAT piece is its over-reliance on he-said/she said balance.
Sure: We hear lines like, “It’s just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships”—but they come not from a neutral observer but from Don Stapley’s lawyer, which minimizes the force of it in readers’ minds.
Further, the story contains no hint of what will be Arpaio’s ultimate role, which will be target of a federal investigation. When the criminal sheriff is ultimately removed from office, stories like this will seem pretty timid.
Meanwhile, Talking Points Memo has a good overview of the current shenanigans created by the Dimmer twins in a new round of intimidation tactics against local judges. The writer, is less complacent about federal intervention:
The Justice Department could step in and end Arpaio and Thomas’s reign of terror, which threatens the integrity of the entire judicial and law enforcement systems for the nations’ fourth-most populous county. But DOJ appears to be working at a leisurely pace: its probe has been underway for over a year, and there’s no sign that it’s having any effect in checking Arpaio’s actions.
And finally, speaking of New Times, Michael Lacey, the chain’s top editor and one of the owners who was arrested in 2007, has an expansive cover story this week called The Pink Negro.
The title is a reference—one I find pretty indigestible—to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro.” (The idea is that Obama is a buttoned-up preppy black.)
Leaving that aside, Lacey’s thesis is that the Obama administration is taking too long is investigating:
Yes, [Obama’s] federal investigators are here examining the assaults against human rights perpetrated by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas.
But, after 20 months, we must ask: Are they unearthing evidence or burying it?
There is, as yet, no remedy, no redress, no recourse.
President Obama, unwittingly, put the glacial timeline of his Arpaio/Thomas investigation into perspective during his speech to America last week. He said his troop surge will see our soldiers depart Afghanistan after 19 more months of combat. In other words, the war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban will end triumphantly in less time than the feds have spent — without result — probing Arpaio and Thomas.
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon formally summoned a Justice Department task force in April 2008. As we usher in 2010, federal officials have yet to contact the very first political victim of the sheriff and the county attorney. Critical documents remain unexamined.
In the source of making its case the extravagantly long piece is an effective overview of the current state of Arpaio’s many, many criminal enterprises.
7:00 AM
Joe Arpaio at the Cronkite School: The zoo approacheth
The Arizona Republic and KPHO have both posted stories about Monday’s live “Meet the Press”-style interview of Joe Arpaio at ASU’s Cronkite School of journalism.
Arpaio’s going to be questioned by three profs from the school at 7 p.m.
Both stories are pretty incompetent. The Republic story says that interest in the event will surely swamp the smallish school atrium where the interview will be held, so the school’s going to show it on a large video screen and stream it over the internet.
The paper doesn’t bother to tell readers where the screen will be, or what the web address for the stream is.
For the record, the video will be shown in the public mall just south of the Cronkite building, which is on the east side of Central Avenue between Polk and Fillmore.
The video stream will be here, according to the school.
The KPHO story is equally unhelpful; worse, it lets the sheriff natter on about how good he is with the press:
“There have been blips about some weekly newspaper — we didn’t give an answer to a request — but that’s been straightened out. But I think it’s great. If there’s anyone who has an open door policy, I think it’s the sheriff,” said Arpaio.
As anyone who reads the New Times knows, there are three inaccuracies in merely the first sentence alone. The KPHO reporter doesn’t bother to ask him about them.
The Republic story doesn’t mention that some students plan to protest the event; the KPHO story does, but neither note that local Tea Party activists are showing up as well.
PHXated’s background on the event is here and here.
12:00 AM
Local twitterer says he wants to shoot President Obama
The Feathered Bastard has the story:
Lemons says the guy’s real name seem to be Eric L. Arteaga. who he says is a Scottsdale musician.
6:00 AM