The inaugural Together: The New England Electronic Music Festival will be held in venues around Beantown in February. The festival, which was founded and is being run by Weekly Dig staffers David Day and Mike McKay, is also sponsored by the Dig.
David Koon and Gerard Matthews of Arkansas Times, who took home a first place award for media reporting, will be interviewed by Las Vegas Weekly editor Scott Dickensheets on AAN.org this Friday (Dec. 11) at 3 pm EST.
Like several other alt-weeklies, Creative Loafing (Tampa) has put together a holiday auction to raise funds for a local nonprofit, but with a new twist: Cover space, a news story and a restaurant review in the paper are among the items up for bid. "This is our way of saying 'This is not how we do business,'" editor David Warner tells the St. Petersburg Times. "Just this once, you'll see what you get if our content actually is for sale. It's ironic, unchartered (sic) territory."
As part of a bankruptcy judge's August decision to turn Creative Loafing, Inc. over to its creditors, the Tampa paper had to vacate its old office building, which was owned by the Eason family. This week is Creative Loafing (Tampa)'s first in its new offices, located in the historic Ybor Square area, and editor David Warner is already impressed with a seemingly simple aspect: being able to get out of the office and walk around. "That may not sound like much, but after five (!) years cooped up in a former fruit warehouse where you had to get in your car to do anything outside the office, this was, literally, a dream," he writes.
Boston Phoenix staff writer David Bernstein was named Journalist of the Year by the New England Press Association. He also brought home two additional first-place awards for the Phoenix -- in the Investigative Reporting and Serious Columnist categories. "Mr. Bernstein's in-depth articles are compelling and hyper-relevant, challenging myths and assumptions with sharp, clear reporting and a highly readable writing style," the judges write. "Very impressive!" All in all, the Phoenix won another nine awards, including additional first-place wins for Convergence and Reporting on Religious Issues. Worcester Magazine took home six awards, including first-place finishes in the Personality Photo, Social Issues Feature Story and Local Ad: Color categories. Boston's Weekly Dig won four awards, finishing first in Educational Reporting, Infographics and Transportation/Commuter Reporting. The Portland Phoenix also won four awards, and placed first in the General News Story category.
As part of company-wide cuts at Creative Loafing, Washington City Paper and Creative Loafing (Charlotte) have each reportedly laid off two employees. In addition, Mediabistro is reporting on an unspecified number of layoffs at L.A. Weekly, and the Valley Advocate says that last week associate publisher Do-Han Allen and circulation manager Jeffrey Owczarski became "the latest casualties of a series of year-end layoffs by our parent company." A few days after his paper laid off seven, Creative Loafing (Tampa) editor David Warner dedicates his editor's note to a list of "the Top 10 Reasons Layoffs Suck."
In the fourth installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Arkansas Times associate editor David Koon talks to Corina Knoll about his feature profile of writer Mohja Kahf, a novelist, poet and sex columnist working to change public perception of Muslim women. Koon talks about finding the story, trying to paint a true picture of a sympathetic source, and how his creative writing background informs his work. "A lot of the things I know -- how to create character, how to create mood and theme -- translate straight across to features," he says. "I think a lot of people who gravitate toward alternative journalism and do it well come from a creative-writing background."
In a piece for Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, Craig Cox weaves a review of David Carr's The Night of the Gun with personal anecdotes about Carr (a former editor for the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader, City Pages' crosstown rival) and the Twin Cities alt-weekly scene of the 1980s. "Once you were accepted into the club as a freelancer or -- dream of dreams -- a staffer at one of the two local alternative weeklies, you were plugged into the local pop culture scene in a way no one else was," Cox writes. "You didn't have to be high or narcissistic back then to feel good about working six days a week, every week (as we did at City Pages) for three or four hundred bucks. It was kind of an exclusive fraternity."
CL's Atlanta editor Ken Edelstein reports that he laid off two editorial staffers on Monday: Senior editor Scott Freeman and senior writer David Lee Simmons. In addition, the St. Petersburg Times reports that CL's Tampa paper has let go of Lance Goldenberg, who'd been a freelance film critic for the paper for 19 years. In his statement, Tampa editor David Warner said that the hole in film coverage will be filled with staff writers from CL's newly acquired papers in Chicago and Washington.
Replacing David Blum as editor-in-chief of the Press is Jerry Portwood, who was previously the paper's managing editor. Blum becomes editor of 02138, the bi-monthly magazine acquired in May by Press parent company Manhattan Media. Blum's move coincides with a major re-launch of the luxury lifestyle magazine for Harvard alumni.
