Speer co-founded Chico News & Review in 1977 and has served the paper in various capacities for over 30 years.
Palo Alto Weekly picked up the coveted general excellence award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
Monterey County Weekly took first place for General Excellence.
San Francisco Bay Guardian picked up the coveted General Excellence award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. Palo Alto Weekly led all alt-weeklies with ten awards.
The California Newspaper Publishers Association recently gave out 480 first and second place awards in its 2009 Better Newspapers contest, and nine alt-weeklies received at least one. The Sacramento News & Review won ten awards, including firsts for Public Service, Columns, Sports Story, Front Page, Freedom of Information. SF Weekly won seven awards, including first-place finishes for Writing, Investigative/Enterprise Reporting and Environmental/Ag Resource Reporting. The North Coast Journal won six awards, including firsts in the Writing, Local News Coverage, Business/Financial Story and Environmental/Ag Resource Reporting categories. Palo Alto Weekly took home five awards -- all first-place wins -- in the Editorial Comment, Local News Coverage, Sports Coverage, Feature Photo, Best Website and General Excellence categories. Chico News & Review won two awards, both firsts, for Editorial Pages and Special Issue. Pacific Sun also took home two awards, both firsts, for Feature Story and Lifestyle Coverage. Metro Silicon Valley, Pasadena Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian each took home one award.
The publication will spotlight a different segment of the local economy each month, and its title will change accordingly. The inaugural issue is Shop Local; Stay Local, Dine Local and Eat Local are among the subsequent issues being planned. "Community spirit runs high where the CN&R is read. Neighbors support neighbors," editor Evan Tuchinsky writes. "The Shop Local movement is an extension of that spirit, something the News & Review wants to encourage."
The California Newspaper Publishers Association announced the winners of its annual Better Newspapers Contest on Saturday, and nine AAN members won a total of 38 awards. The Sacramento News & Review won a total of nine awards, five of which were first-place finishes, including a General Excellence win. "The News & Review is a salty and irreverent weekly packed with excellent coverage of news and culture, multiple voices in columns and two pages of letters," the judges wrote. "Its colorful design is inviting and, praises to the sales department, it is packed with ads." In addition, Palo Alto Weekly also won nine total awards; the North Coast Journal won eight; Chico News & Review won four; the San Francisco Bay Guardian won three; Metro Silicon Valley won two; and the Pacific Sun, Pasadena Weekly and SF Weekly each took home one award. CORRECTION: The Santa Barbara Independent also won five awards.
The Beat, a tabloid-style weekly launched by former News & Review editors Tom Gascoyne and Josh Indar in August 2006, announced last week that it was shutting down. "The paper tried to fill a niche to the political left of the [Chico News & Review] but never caught on with advertisers," the News & Review reports.
In November, the Sacramento News & Review launched its Face to Face Video Ad project. The ads, which have also been rolled out at the company's paper in Chico and will soon hit its Reno paper, are serious, in-depth recorded interviews with vendors about their products and services. News & Review president and CEO Jeff von Kaenel says the idea was inspired by a vacation to India with his teenage daughter, who was shooting and editing video of the trip. "The video technology had gotten so easy to use," he says, it got him thinking about how the paper could take advantage of the technological leaps. So far, the initial reaction to the project has been promising, according to Susan Cooper, sales development manager at the Sacramento paper. In this Q&A with AAN News, she talks in more detail about the project.
