Fresh Loaf
Atlanta news and views, one slice at a time
Annals of bizarro: Man sentenced for child porn, ‘tofu babies’
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009Um, I’m at a loss for words over this one. How about you check out an excerpt from the press release that just landed in my inbox:
The press release goes on to state: “GERRY claimed that the molds were for him to make tofu babies to serve at dinner parties.”
Have fun in federal prison, Phil!
Annals of bizarro: Andisheh publicly questions Sunday Paper news editor
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
On his blog Andy2000.org, former CL senior writer and current freelancer Andisheh Nouraee poses a rather pointed question to the Sunday Paper and its news editor, former CL staff writer Stephanie Ramage:
Ms. Ramage and Sunday Paper management owe the public a clear answer to a simple question: Did Ms. Ramage author a comment to John Sugg’s column using the pseudonym Lazarus?
If so, Nouraee continues:
[S]he has used her position as an editor at Sunday Paper to launch anonymous personal attacks, [and] she’s violating more professional rules and ethics than I can count.
The Lazarus comment, according to Nouraee, contains “several false and slanderous personal and professional allegations about my friend and former CL editor Ken Edelstein.”
The column to which the comment was posted was written by yet another former Loafer, Sugg. His column — in my estimation, anyway — has its own conflict-rich history. (For yet another potential conflict-of-interest that I didn’t address, check out the end of this Atlanta Magazine blog post.)
That brings the total number of former Loafers involved in this imbroglio to FOUR — not counting Sunday Paper Publisher Patrick Best, who’s hardly kept his nose out of the news.
Real Housewives, move over.
Annals of bizarro: Still no death sentence for Nichols
Friday, December 12th, 2008The jury now has been deliberating for three days on whether to send convicted courthouse killer Brian Nichols to his death.
The guy shoots a judge and court reporter dead in their own courtroom; kills a deputy en route to his next crime, a violent carjacking; and later guns down a federal agent — and it takes THREE DAYS to decide his fate?
The latest from the AJC is that the Judge Rowland Barnes’ widow is “almost numb just from waiting.”
According to the story, the jury will reconvene on Saturday if it can’t reach a decision today.
Annals of bizarro: Sugg dishes on the Loaf in the Sunday Paper
Friday, November 28th, 2008
Love him or hate him, former CL Senior Editor John Sugg never fails to get lips a-flappin’ with his firebrand columns — particularly one published today, under the headline “Creative Loafing’s death spiral.”
The column talks about “the demolition of the newspaper’s once-outstanding journalism” (ouch!), how “the content eroded to a state that can only be called pathetic” (egads!) and that “the big losers are the readers” (sorry, guys!).
Other than Sugg’s hyperbolic elegies, I have two issues with his column — the same two issues I had when Sugg presented the column to me three days before it appeared on the Sunday Paper’s website.
My first concern is that Sugg used his column to criticize newspapers, including the Loaf, for “hanging on to printed editions long after consumers were decidedly digital.” Basically, he’s calling out CL for putting so much of its faith (at least in the past) in its print edition. Fair enough. Yet Sugg failed to disclose that he and a crew of fellow talented journalists are currently trying to secure funding for an online-only news organization.
He and the organization arguably could benefit from spreading the online-only gospel. That, to me, is a conflict of interest — one that warranted a full disclosure. I told him so, and he agreed.
My other issue had not to do with the possibility that Sugg might profit from what he printed but, rather, that he didn’t explicitly state that he’d lost money as a result of what he described as “the erratic and impetuous” managerial style of Creative Loafing Inc.’s CEO Ben Eason. Sugg did disclose in the column that he’s a Creative Loafing Inc. shareholder, but he didn’t outright state that Eason’s supposed missteps were a blow to his own finances — or that he might harbor anger toward Eason because of that financial hit.
Anyway, you might be wondering why I read the column days before it appeared in another publication. Sugg had emailed the column to me on Tuesday night, to be printed in next week’s Creative Loafing. But as I had mentioned to him the day before, I and the rest of the staff wanted to print a column about the contributions of former CL Editor Ken Edelstein, who’d just been fired.
I asked Sugg to retool the column. He said he would — but instead wrote an entirely different piece. The original then appeared in the Sunday Paper.
At this point, the conflicts have become so convoluted that, although we’ll be running a column about Edelstein in our next edition, it won’t be written by Sugg. When I told him that, he said he understood the decision. Hey, no hard feelings.
P.S. — Note to SP editors: Your headline for Sugg’s column (and the column itself) alludes to CL’s “strategy” to “rip off articles and blogs from real content producers and paste them onto CL Web sites.” You seem to be referring to a sidebar on our website’s home page, where we link to stories we find interesting in other publications. The whole thing takes less than 5 percent of the staff’s time. It’s called “aggregation,” and it’s practiced by the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and, to a greater extent, Talking Points Memo and the Daily Beast. Wake up to the Internetz!
