Former Creative Loafing (Atlanta) staffer Heather Kuldell, who started work at AAN last week, will be responsible for coordinating the association's annual editorial contest. The Washington, D.C.-area native started at Creative Loafing as an intern and worked her way through several positions, including listings editor, assistant A&E editor and music editor.
Newspeak, a Colorado Springs blog with a strong alt-weekly pedigree, says The Stranger's Slog is "one of the best blogs on the internet and you can skip the local crap if it doesn't interest you." In fact, the folks at Newspeak think the Seattle paper is "the only alt-weekly in the country to have figured out why blogging is an alt's best friend and do it with teeth, wit and style." Perhaps they haven't read the Arkansas Times' Arkansas Blog, which John Brummett of The Morning News calls "by far" the best Arkansas political blog.
The local chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners named Sally Barnes one of the four contestants for Business Woman of the Year, according to the Idaho Statesman. The winner will be announced on Jan. 19.
The popular cartoonist, aka Dan Perkins, is asking his fans to sign a petition in support of returning his widely syndicated strip, "This Modern World," to the print edition of the Manhattan alt-weekly. Although the cartoon still appears online at villagevoice.com, Perkins reports via his blog that it was dropped from the paper "sometime in the last two or three months."
AAN members and others planning to attend the Jan. 26-27 regional staff-training conference in San Francisco now have until Jan. 9 to take advantage of early registration rates. The deadline for registering at the Miyako Hotel, the Japantown property that is hosting the conference for the first time, has also been extended.
The indy publishing non-profit has closed its doors after 10 years of defending the interests and increasing the solvency of small and independent magazines, reports Jeremy Adam Smith in Other magazine. Smith eulogizes IPA with pride and sadness -- "it grew rapidly from a scrappy little nonprofit into a multimillion-dollar social venture" -- mixed with bitterness toward the group's last executive director, Richard Landry. The news does not come as a complete shock, however. Last June, the SF Weekly published an investigative expose of the problems plaguing IPA's newsstand service, as well as what Smith calls "the destruction of the community that once defined the organization."
James Renner has released a book-length investigation into the unsolved 1989 abduction and murder of 11-year-old Amy Mihaljevic, reports the Record-Courier. "Amy: My Search for Her Killer," is published by Gray & Company, and grew out of a 5,000-word feature originally written for the Free Times. The book has already led to numerous tips for local law enforcement, says Renner. "My hope is that someone comes forward to say that they know who killed Amy," he says.
The Stranger's Andrew Bleeker and Seattle Weekly's Gavin Borchert will compete with 10 other finalists in the championship round of the Seattle Spelling Bee on Jan. 8, reports Bleeker in the Stranger. The event is the culmination of six months of alcohol-drenched semi-finals. "Over the course of [the] monthly events, the Seattle Spelling Bee has inspired nerves and drinking in equal measure," writes Bleeker. "This is far from a two-horse race, though -- everyone in the finals has the chops to win. ... Hearts will break, honor will flourish, and at least one person will get spectacularly drunk."
Gawker Media's music blog will release the results of its first annual critics poll on Friday, hoping to supplant The Village Voice's 32-year-old Pazz & Jop poll, reports the Los Angeles Times. Longtime Voice music critic Robert Christgau (pictured), who was fired after New Times merged with Village Voice Media, will participate in both polls. "The decision to vote in the [Voice] poll was something I thought about the first week I was fired," says Christgau. "And I said, 'Gee, yeah, I think I want to do that.'"
As pioneering mega-sites like YouTube and MySpace have become increasingly regulated, young people are seeking out competitors with few or no limits on content, reports the New York Times. This unfiltered frontier includes sites such as Stickam.com, a social-networking start-up that allows users to stream live webcasts without the oversight associated with the site's larger competitors. "People are going to go where the content is," says Robin Bechtel, vice president for new media at Warner Brothers Records, which opened a page on Stickam for two of its artists. "If Stickam has celebrities and is entertaining, they will go there."
