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T A B L E__T A L K Netscape vs. Internet Explorer: Has anything changed in the browser wars in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Service with an artificial smile By Robert Rossney Supermarket clubs point the way to a future of corporate-mandated friendliness and Stepford clerks (10/14/98) Getting to know all about you By Jennifer Vogel Attention, shoppers -- what you tell supermarket clubs may be used against you (10/14/98) The joy of Perl By Andrew Leonard How Larry Wall invented a messy programming language -- and changed the face of the Web (10/13/98) Typing for nonconformists By Alex Marshall The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand (10/12/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Free speech or blatant ripoff? Copyright suit pits newspapers against conservative site (10/09/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Congress' roster of hypocrisy; Lego robots for Mac addicts - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

THE COOKIE MONSTER OF PUTNAM PIT | PAGE 1,2 - - - - - - - - - - In May 1996, the first 200 issues of the photocopied 8-and-a-half-by-11 Putnam Pit were handed out around town. An anonymous Cookeville resident then kicked in $1,000 to bump circulation up to 2,000 the next month. Davidian went online that December after copies kept ending up in town dumpsters. From its inception, the Pit began petitioning town bureaucrats with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Tennessee Public Records Act. Davidian wanted to see time cards for the city lawyer's work in his speeding trial, pre-employment test results of police officers, names of people arrested after a town official's party, exit interviews with town cops, parking violations records and personnel files from the city hospital. Most of the requests were completely or partially turned down, with a variety of arguments such as cost, lack of Tennessee citizenship and the existence of outstanding public information disputes. City Manager Jim Shipley, the chief administrator of Cookeville and a co-defendant in some of the lawsuits, said that processing Davidian's requests have wasted much city time. "Any private citizen or anybody from the media would not take in most cases more than 15 minutes to see what they need to see," Shipley said. "People were tied up with him for a whole day in some cases." Dyana Bagby, a reporter for the Cookeville Herald-Citizen, said Davidian's personality frays some people's nerves. "I know he causes a lot of problems with city officials," Bagby said. "I covered the recent county elections here in August, and me and several radio reporters were in the elections office all day and all night waiting for the results to come in. I think he came in at 11 p.m. and demanded to get the final results before they were actually ready ... he was berating the employees, demanding to get something they did not have ready yet and saying it was his First Amendment right." Davidian says that he is merely shaking up a cozy good-old-boys network. "If the Hair-Oiled Citroen just did their job, I'd get out of town," he said. "But they don't ask for public records." In August 1997, the Putnam Pit broke new ground by asking to see Cookeville's "cookie" files -- files placed on a user's computer by a Web site that can track usage and visits. Arguing that cookies are basically equivalent to phone logs -- which are generally considered public records -- Davidian asked City Hall to let him check whether municipal employees were accessing sites "not consistent with government employment." The city delayed for three months, then allowed Davidian to inspect the computers. He found no cookie files there -- he says the city had deleted them. The Pit editor sued in Tennessee court, which removed the case to federal court. Outside of Putnam County, access to cookies and other computer records is likely to become a hot issue, said Robert Gellman, former chief counsel to the House Government Operations subcommittee on information, justice, transportation and agriculture and now a Washington-based privacy and information policy consultant. "A couple of well-written FOIA requests could really cause a lot of commotion at some [government] agencies, and they could produce some really interesting news stories," said Gellman, emphasizing that cached image files, bookmarks and browser history files all contain more potentially damning information than the more sexy-sounding cookies. "But there is no guarantee, and it could take a long time to bear fruit. On the other hand, it would take about 20 minutes to write the request." Lost in the flurry of lawsuits has been Davidian's career as a paid journalist. The Pit editor estimates he's spent roughly $50,000 on editorial costs and $2,000-$3,000 on legal fees over the past three years, while making $1,000 in revenue. "I went from $60,000, $70,000 a year to living in a garage," he said. "But I think I'll get a book or a movie or something out of it, because it's a great case. It's a great story." The Cookeville officials Davidian so sharply ridicules on his site do not share his enthusiasm for the story. "I don't think a lot of people read it. I certainly don't, and nobody I know does," Shipley said. "If things were as bad as he says they are, I would think that some state or federal investigators would come down here to clean things up. So far they haven't." Bagby said no one at the Herald-Citizen reads the Pit regularly, nor do they follow up on its stories of fixed parking tickets, improper overtime pay and missing municipal funds. "I would agree with Mr. Shipley, and I'm trying to speak as an objective journalist," Bagby said. Loyola University of New Orleans communication professor Larry Lorenz, who taught Davidian at Marquette 25 years ago and who writes occasional columns for the Pit, said his star pupil's culture clash may be generational as well as geographical. "I think he would have been at home with the muckrakers of the early 20th century," Lorenz said. "He carries the same sense of moral outrage at injustice ... He's a genuine crusader. Most newspapers will no longer allow themselves to have a crusader." Lorenz said he was initially surprised to hear that Davidian had expended so much energy in a small town in Tennessee. "I wondered if it wasn't some kind of small potatoes, if he wasn't Don Quixote poking at windmills over there," he said. Davidian says he's doing what any good journalist would do if confronted by corruption and fear. "This is not funny. I'm not making this up. People are dead. People are DEAD," he says. "People write to me, but they won't sign their names. They want to subscribe, but they don't want it mailed to their home. They want to advertise, but they don't want their name on it. They'll advertise, but then they'll call and say, 'Please take my name off it. I don't want it there anymore.'" Claudia Eldridge, mother of the woman whose death led to the Putnam Pit, said Davidian is not being paranoid when he registers in different hotels in different towns each time he visits. "He's the only one who's able to say what he wants because he doesn't live there," said Eldridge, who is in California temporarily to receive treatment for colon cancer. "It sounds like I'm crazy, which is why I don't talk about it. But people live in fear there." Davidian is hoping one of his lawsuits generates enough money to pay off his debts and fund his journalistic investigations. "And if I get that money I'm gonna open up a paper, and you know what I'm going to do? I'm gonna see that all these fuckers go to jail," he said. "They're gonna have to firebomb me." SALON | Oct. 15, 1998 Matt Welch, news editor at Tabloid.net, lives in Los Angeles.