"Dinner with Amy"

The socialist Appeal to Reason used yachts, fruit farms and motorcycles as premiums for subscription revenue to keep going. On occasion, Democracy Now! has offered big donors a 'Dinner with Amy Goodman."

After meeting Amy at a dinner party, Regis (and Kelly) acknowledge their TV show is about "nothing." (Is that a parody of Morning Latte skit on Saturday Night Live?)

Indy magazine Harper's loses

...its Washington Editor, Ken Silverstein: "Washington and Washington politics has worn me down. Every time I write a story I feel like I wrote it a year ago and five years ago and 10 years ago. Nothing ever changes here." His powerful, depressing "Signing Out" column is here.

Lynching of blacks...

. . .prompted this classic Billie Holiday song, which she recorded in the late 1930s over the objections of her record company: "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees". One of the last lynchings took place in Poplarville, Mississippi, in 1959.

First Indy Publications -- Reader (Un)Friendly

Check out the dense layout of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist publication, The Liberator: here and here and here. Not exactly HuffingtonPost. Cady Stanton's/Anthony's feminist publication, The Revolution, was a tiny bit less dense. Content was king (or queen) back then.

Kate Sheppard, '06 IC grad

Kate has built a career in indy outlets, now working at Mother Jones -- where she blogs on energy and environment news. Her latest piece was outside that beat, about U.S. soldiers being exposed by American contractor KBR to toxic chemicals in Iraq. She appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show last year.

Activists Tell FCC on Net Neutrality...

Quit waffling! A year after the Federal Communications Commission chairman made a speech warning that fast action was needed to keep a free and open Internet, no action has been taken.

Crowd-funded investigative piece...

...just published, thanks to Spot.us.