The Dallas Observer, Fort Worth Weekly, and Houston Press were all honored when the Press Club's announced its 50th annual Katie Awards Saturday night. The Press won a total of three awards in the large newspapers division, including a first-place win for Column. The Observer, which also competed in the large newspapers division, won one award. In the small and medium newspapers division, the Weekly took home a total of four awards, three of which were first-place finishes -- in Business reporting, Investigative Series or Story, and Specialty Reporting.

Continue ReadingThree AAN Members Take Home Press Club of Dallas Awards

In a video interview from last month's Digital Hollywood conference, Village Voice Media director of web and digital operations Bill Jensen tells Vator TV's Ezra Roizen about how VVM has stepped up its game online. "The key is ... we had to go daily," Jensen says. "That was the biggest challenge ... changing the culture to go from weekly to daily." He says that each VVM paper now has about 30 pieces of daily content going up on its site, in addition to the weekly content being created for the paper.

Continue ReadingVVM’s Digital Director Talks About How They’ve Approached the Web

Gerald Peary, who has been a critic for more 30 years, celebrated his career last night with a special screening of his three favorite films at a Cambridge theater. To mark that occasion, he spoke with BU Daily about how film criticism has changed over the years, his film-crit documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, and the difference between reviewing and criticism. "Reviewing is the basic lunch bucket job that everybody does, which is consumer reporting," Peary says. "But what a critic does in addition is contextualize the movie in terms of history, politics, a filmmaker's career, and genre. A film critic sees the movie as just a starting point for a more general discussion."

Continue ReadingBoston Phoenix Film Critic on the State of Film Criticism

Adamma Ince, who worked at the Voice for 12 years until she left last fall, will replace longtime PW editor Tim Whitaker. Whitaker had been the paper's editor since 1994, when it was known as Welcomat. At the Voice, Ince served as chief of research, associate editor, reporter, and, most recently, managing editor. "Adamma gained valuable experience and a special passion for editorial from The Village Voice in New York which can only lift PW to new heights in the fast changing world of print and electronic media," Anthony A. Clifton, the CEO of PW parent company Review Publishing, says in a release.

Continue ReadingVillage Voice Vet Named New Editor of Philadelphia Weekly

In the wake of the passage of a same-sex marriage ban in California last week, an effort that was heavily funded by the Mormon church, Dan Savage and others have called for boycotting the state. "Trouble is, all Utahns aren't to blame, nor are all Mormons," writes Salt Lake City Weekly founder John Saltas. "A nonspecific call to boycott is never effective and is fraught with misdirected fire." He concludes that "since Savage hates Utah so much, there's no point in us playing in his sandbox by sending him a regular check." MORE:The Village Voice weighs in on the Weekly's decision. STILL EVEN MORE: Savage has been making the media rounds talking about Prop. 8 this week. Check out his New York Times op-ed, his appearance on The Colbert Report and his takedown of Tony Perkins on Anderson Cooper 360.

Continue ReadingSalt Lake City Weekly Drops ‘Savage Love’ After Talk of Utah Boycott

Kara Platoni has won first place honors in the "small newspapers" category in this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Awards for stories in the Express about efforts of local scientists to determine whether there is life elsewhere in the cosmos. Platoni "did a marvelous job of bringing the faraway questions surrounding astrobiology down to Earth and particularly important to the readers in her region," judge Andrew Revkin of the New York Times says. She will receive $3,000 and a plaque at the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting in February.

Continue ReadingEast Bay Express Writer Wins National Science Journalism Award