* MEDIA: Gannett Orders Week Long Furlough Of All Employees NEW YORK TIMES: The Gannett Company, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, said on Wednesday that it would force thousands of its employees to take a week off without pay in an effort to avoid layoffs. Gannett, which owns 85 daily newspapers across the United States including its flagship USA Today, said it could not say exactly how many people would be required to take time off, or how much money the company would save. But it said it would require unpaid leave for most of its 31,000 employees in this […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper chronicles the rise of the record industry — and its subsequent digital-age collapse — in his new book, Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash Of The Record Industry In The Digital Age. Knopper’s work has also appeared in Spin, Esquire, The Washington Post and Wired. RADIO TIMES WITH MARTY MOSS-COANE Hour 1 A look back at President George Bush’s eight years in office. How will he be judged? An analysis of the high and lowpoints with Vanderbilt University historian GARY GERSTLE and Bush biographer, ROBERT DRAPER. Listen to the mp3 Hour 2 […]
GAYDAR EXTRA: Taking The ‘Gay’ Out Of Gaming
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Hey pals and gals. Got a quick one here for ya. Editor-in-chief JV shot me an email the other day (thanks boss) alerting me to a new development in the Christian coteries: apparently, it’s not enough now to censor the sex (nudity), violence, substance abuse, and demonic images (oh lord) in video games, homosexual content is now on the chopping block. According to Tumeroks, a blog dedicated to covering the development and growth of online games (Warhammer online, World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, etc) a Christian conservative investment firm called The Timothy Plan has just […]
THE WIRE: Councilman, Is That A Justice Department Wire Under Your Suit Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?
DAILY NEWS: CITY COUNCILMAN Jack Kelly secretly recorded for federal investigators conversations with his chief of staff and a generous campaign contributor, according to documents obtained by the Daily News. Former chief of staff Chris Wright goes on trial Jan. 27 for corruption charges along with brothers Ravinder and Hardeep Chawla and their attorney, Andrew Teitelman. In an August indictment, the U.S. attorney accused Wright of using his City Hall post to help real estate development companies run by the Chawla brothers and Teitelman, who was also Kelly’s campaign treasurer. In exchange, Wright got cash bribes, free legal advice and […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR After 44 years as a newspaperman, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. is making his debut as a fiction writer. His new novel, The Rules of The Game, features an investigative reporter on the beat of a hotly contested presidential election. Downie joined the Post as an summer intern in 1964, and retired in Sept. 2008 after serving 17 years as the paper’s executive editor. In his last year as editor, the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes for work done in 2007 — the most it had ever earned in one year. ALSO, John Yemma, the […]
HEAR: Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavillion
Now playing on PHAWKER RADIO! THE TIMES OF LONDON: There is cheap music, potent and conducive to an easy sentimentality (and, often, none the worse for that), and there is music that produces in the listener a more complex and gradual reaction, which combines bafflement, the playing of a shy smile on the lips, a rush of heat to the face, a sensation of being once more a child, unsure quite how to respond to or process the experience. Merriweather Post Pavilion, named after an open-air concert venue in Maryland, is a glorious example of the latter. MORE BY JONATHAN […]
WE WILL ROCK YOU: Birds Kick Giants To The Curb
PHILADELPHIA 23 NEW YORK 11
PAPERBOY: Special ‘Gamble & Bluff’ Edition
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer […]
2008 THE YEAR IN DEENEY: Why I Had To Kill VALLEY OF THE SHADOW Before It Killed Me
The Valley of the Shadow is was an ongoing series documenting how those in Philadelphia’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods publicly mourn and commemorate their dead. Jeff Deeney, the man who brought you Today I Saw, knows these neighborhoods well from his days as a social worker. The hope is was to shine a light on the city’s untouchables, brighten the darkest corners and gather-and-share ultra-vivid and all-too-real stories of loss, grief and remembrance. BY JEFF DEENEY Initially the Valley of the Shadow series was conceived as a documentary effort aimed at exploring the street memorial phenomenon that has become […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Although the Bush administration has stated that the interrogations techniques used at Guantanamo Bay came from the bottom up, British lawyer Philippe Sands disagrees. In his 2008 book, Torture Team, Sands argues that the harsh interrogation policy that emerged after Sept. 11 came from high-ranking government officials and top military figures. Sands warned in a June 2008 Fresh Air interview that the impact of the Bush administration’s conduct would be felt internationally: “The terrible tragedy of these memos and that dark period is that they have migrated into the hands of people who now say, ‘Well, Americans do […]
ALMOST FAMOUS: Adventures In Rock Criticism
EDITOR’S NOTE: Recently, Magnet asked me to do one of those Behind The Music-style navel-gazers about some of the cover stories I wrote for the magazine back in the day, with all the behind-the-scenes sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll dirt and gossip that could not be printed in a family indie-rock magazine back in the less-permissive 20th Century. The hard copy came out around Christmas, and last week they posted it to their new-and-improved web site/blog/thingee. I have included this ginormous photo of me, suitable for framing or dartboard-use, which they assured me was going to be the cover. […]