The finalists for the last three AltWeekly Award categories are now in. The leaders in the large-circulation and small-circulation divisions each picked up an additional award, with The Village Voice increasing its overall award count to ten, and the Santa Fe Reporter swelling its total to six.
In a Feb. 1 editor's note, the Bay Guardian's executive editor responded to Craig Newmark's AAN West keynote by arguing that the Craigslist founder's "building community" rap is "bullshit," and that his creation is the online-classifieds equivalent of Wal-Mart. The blogospere responded quickly. Tech exec Anil Dash says he lost his job at the Village Voice when the paper's classified revenue was decimated by Craigslist: "I am exactly the person Redmond is ostensibly arguing on behalf of, and so I can say with certainty that he's profoundly wrong," writes Dash. At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis calls Redmond's editorial "jealous whining," then seizes on his example of Burlington, Vt., as a community where Craigslist's arrival could hurt locally-owned media. After doing a quick once-over on Seven Days' Web site, Jarvis declares the Burlington alt-weekly insufficiently digital, which leads to comments from Seven Days writer and blogger Cathy Resmer (who blogged about Redmond, too) and co-publisher and editor Paula Routly, who writes, "If we're behind Craig Newmark technologically, it's because we’ve been busting our asses for ten years trying to put out an excellent newspaper that serves, and reflects, this community." Click here to watch the blogosphere stomp on Redmond in real-time.
Ben Allen, a conservative Ward 1 Councilman in Jackson, Miss., is authoring a blog hosted on the Jackson Free Press Web site. The blog went live on Jan. 12 with a post in which Allen explains that Free Press Editor in Chief Donna Ladd is "a personal friend," and that he can "live with" the paper's liberal bent if his blog is a venue for two-sided political discussion. Allen goes on to say that he is "enthusiastic about the depth of many of the local ISSUES researched AND REPORTED in-depth by the JFP. We in government get so weary of the lack of real information in local and state issues as covered by our State's largest newspaper." In its first week, the blog generated nearly a thousand views and some polite questions about bike lanes and streetlights.
