Fresh Loaf

1. Video: Midtown Atlanta parking deck collapse aftermath (Weirdly, this ain’t the first collapse tied to Hardin Construction.)

2. Inman Park Properties implosion leaves neighborhood landmarks in limbo (UPDATE: Foreclosure of Inman-owned Clermont Hotel has been delayed.)

3. Profile: Matthew Cardinale, editor of Atlanta Progressive News (Cardinale isn’t one to shy away from controversy. Just read the comments to this post …)

4. Atlanta tax hikes: Profiles in cowardice (Best chocolate eclair analogy ever.)

5. Tiffany Brown joins mayoral race! (We heart ironic punctuation — and mediocre GPAs!)

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The plight of the working class, the homeless and the otherwise disenfranchised are the focus of Matthew Cardinale’s online ‘zine Atlanta Progressive News. Cardinale, a liberal-progressive activist, has weathered such setbacks as a violent stabbing on Ponce de Leon Avenue, the loss of his professorship instructor’s job at Georgia State University and the all-consuming power of Georgia’s conservative right.

Tell me why you decided to create Atlanta Progressive News.
There is a gap in the ecosystem of information. If we want people to become involved, then we must provide them the information they need to become participants. I saw news services beginning to do this, and I wrote for a few them and saw that they could be successful. So I created Atlanta Progressive News to serve in a similar function.

What do you believe is the most important issue facing Atlanta today?
Affordable housing is the most important, because so much else falls from housing. If you don’t have housing, you can’t have anything else. There is a lack of affordable housing in Atlanta. The demolition of public housing is creating a worse housing situation. People don’t understand that moving those who live in public housing into the rental market is a terrible idea. Were all struggling. People should be in support of housing as a right. You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not you can afford housing.

(more…)

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Just an update: Matthew Cardinale, who broke the story about blogger Andre Walker’s payments from U.S. Rep. David Scott, responded late last night to my inquiry about Walker’s own response to his story.

Walker argued yesterday that Atlanta Progressive News, where Cardinale is news editor, was being hypocritical because APN took campaign ad money from three candidates it endorsed.

Here’s Cardinale’s response:

Dear Ken,

… These were all ad purchases. Creative Loafing sells ads too, right?

The difference is our readers can see exactly who is advertising when the ads run and if they feel ads affect content they can take that into consideration.

To insinuate ads affect endorsements, our recent slate of endorsements laid out a number of principled issue positions with which we made our decisions.

Also, Atlanta Housing Authority can advertise on our website if they want to (really, we’ll take their money), but we’re not going to all of a sudden stop investigating them. David Scott can advertise too and he’s still a corporate centrist.

(He’s referring to AHA and Scott because APN’s written critically about both of them.)

I pretty much agree with Cardinale — though you could accuse me (as one commenter to my last post basically did) of saying so because we take ads. Just as Matthew said about APN, ads don’t affect what we write in our articles — though what we report has occasionally affected advertising. Around this whole conflict of interest standpoint, ads at least have the benefit of being right out there for everyone to see, so they can judge for themselves if they feel as if a story matches a special interest; payments from political candidates might be disclosed on campaign reports, but how many people pour over them?

‘NOTHER UPDATE: Andre Walker posted a mea culpa of sorts on Georgia Politics Unfiltered this morning. I apologize that this is coming so late. As noted elsewhere, we had awful Internet problems today in the office, which kinda hampered things.

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