Eric Celeste departs after one year at the helm.
Cincinnati CityBeat, Cleveland Scene and The Other Paper each received nods from the local chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Miami New Times editor Chuck Strouse will lead both papers. New Times Broward-Palm Beach editor Eric Barton will depart.
New Creative Loafing (Atlanta) editor Eric Celeste has previously served as associate editor of the Dallas Observer.
The Other Paper in Columbus was named Best Non-Daily Newspaper in Ohio. Cleveland's Scene also fared well, claiming first in two features categories.
Eric Barton, the managing editor of Village Voice Media's The Pitch in Kansas City, will take over soon as the company's top editorial employee in Fort Lauderdale. According to a VVM press release, Barton "was closely involved in the growth of The Pitch's website" during his tenure in Kansas City, and he helped Pitch.com "double its traffic by adding blogs, video, audio, podcasts and slideshows." Barton takes the reins at New Times Broward-Palm Beach on September 22.
Metro and Boulevards are joining forces with a Bay Area NBC affiliate, two leading local citizen journalism sites, and the news aggregator Topix to create "a wide-ranging community-based news initiative ... that will span print, web, citizen journalism and broadcasting." Stories from Metro will be available for the broadcast partners to use, and stories from the citizen journalism sites and the TV network will be excerpted in a new section called "Mashup!" in Metro's print edition. "We are concerned about the consolidation, layoffs and disinvestment in local publishing and want to make sure that communities here are well covered," Dan Pulcrano, executive editor of Metro and CEO of Boulevards, says in a statement. "We will be expanding our news coverage and adding resources."
Eric Johnson says he'll be leaving next month. "I feel sad to have to leave this newspaper," he says. "For the past six years, I've been proud to work with a team that tries every week to create something that can make a difference in people's lives. ... I'll miss almost everything about it, but it's time to go."
Eric Benjamin, who previously served as a senior executive for the Advocate Newspapers in Connecticut and Gambit Weekly in New Orleans, has returned to his hometown, joining the Boston Phoenix national sales department as an account executive. Benjamin, who was also president of the Alternative Weekly Network for several years, most recently served as general manager of Gannett's Times of Acadiana in Lafayette, La.
Eric D. Snider has been a film critic for nearly 10 years, but he had never attended a press junket until last month, when he went to Seattle to interview the stars of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. Snider could have basked in the lavish treatment given to writers, but instead he felt embarrassed and guilty, so he decided to expose the entire decadent process -- and the resultant shoddy, fluffy journalism -- on his blog: "[Critics on the junket] are basically being bought by the studio: We'll show you a good time, and then you be our monkey-boys and write lots of nice stories about us!" wrote Snider, whose reviews appear in Salt Lake City Weekly and Willamette Week. The blog post quickly gained attention and was linked from major journalism sites, leading to a strong reaction from Paramount, the studio that hosted the shindig: "I expected not to be invited to any more junkets, which would be fine, because I didn't intend to go on any more. But they took it a step further and banned me from all their press screenings," Snider told Bob Garfield in the Aug. 18 On the Media broadcast.
