Marin County’s Pacific Sun has been acquired by Bob Heinen, one of the initial employees and an early shareholder in Embarcadero Media, the Palo Alto-based company that has owned the Sun since 2004.
San Diego CityBeat editor David Rolland and account executive Jason Noble have filled out paperwork to put their names on the ballot for the Arizona presidential primary.
AAN has launched a new dynamic website that merges the association's trade site (aan.org) and story-sharing site (AltWeeklies.com) into one content-heavy arena for both AAN members and the general public.
Editor Jon Whiten is leaving the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies; he will be replaced by current Editorial Awards and Advertising Director Jason Zaragoza. Whiten, who joined AAN in January 2006, is stepping down to focus on the local news website and arts & culture magazine he owns and operates in Jersey City, N.J. His last day on staff is March 31, but he will continue as a part-time contractor, overseeing AAN.org, for a month or two, as Zaragoza transitions from his current position into the editor role.
As usual, AAN members are well-represented in the list of finalists for the 2010 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, which recognize excellence in food writing. The L.A. Weekly's Jonathan Gold and Westword's Jason Sheehan (who is now at Seattle Weekly) are both nominated for the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Reviews, and Gold is also a finalist in the Writing on Spirits, Wine or Beer category. Elsewhere, the Newspaper Feature Writing category is comprised only of AAN members, with two Chicago Reader pieces and one from the Village Voice vying for the top prize. Westword nabs another finalist in the Newspaper Feature Writing About Restaurants and/or Chefs, where it is joined as a finalist by Washington City Paper. And last, but certainly not least, the Houston Press is a finalist in the Multimedia Food Feature category. Winners will be announced on May 2.
Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty has been named one of TIME's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2009. "It's a paradox of the post-Bourdain era: chef memoirs are trendy, but none of the chefs writing them have the freakish combination of cooking and writing talent that made Anthony Bourdain a star," Lev Grossman writes. "But Jason Sheehan comes damn close, and he gives the genre his own distinctive seasoning." Sheehan recently made the move from Westword to the Seattle Weekly.
Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen was released late last month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sheehan says the book is about "the often wonderful, sometimes terrible things that result from sticking four or five or ten poorly socialized men together for hours at a stretch in a small steel box filled with knives and fire." National Public Radio is just one of the media outlets to have sung the book's praises thus far, including it on its summer nonfiction reading list (and running a lengthy excerpt). "If chefs are the new rock stars, Jason Sheehan is like a grunge guitarist of the old school," John Freeman writes.
Democratic state delegate Joseph D. Morrissey has filed a $10.35 million libel suit against Style Weekly for an article the alt-weekly published last April about the politician's finances and related legal battles. The suit, which seeks $10 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages, names Style's parent company, TWCC Holding Corp., along with editor Jason Roop and the story's authors, Amy Biegelsen and Chris Dovi. When contacted on Monday by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roop said he hadn't seen the suit and therefore couldn't comment on it.
The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies has hired Jason Zaragoza to the newly created position of advertising and awards coordinator. His first day with AAN was Oct. 14. Zaragoza takes over for Stephanie Roswell in handling the logisitics of the AAN CAN classified network, and for Heather Kuldell in coordinating the AltWeekly Awards. "Jason is smart and organized, and he has an incredibly professional attitude for someone so young," says AAN executive director Richard Karpel. "We're counting on him to keep AAN CAN and the awards contest running smoothly."
Former Rocky Mountain Chronicle and Colorado Springs Independent editor Vanessa Martinez was eating lunch on Monday in Denver when a thief made off with her bag, which included cash, credit cards and her ID, which she needed to get into DNC events. After she called her credit card company and found out the guy was already on a spending spree nearby, she headed to the Virgin Megastore where he'd just bought some items. Before she got there, though, she ran into him on the street. "The poor guy couldn't have seen it coming," Westword's Joel Warner writes. "Biff! Bam! Kapow! Martinez punched him in the face, walloped him with his own shopping bag and tore at his shirt. He pulled out her stolen credit cards in surrender, but that didn't stop the fury." The pickpocket was taken into custody, and Martinez got her stuff back shortly after the scuffle. In other DNC-related news, check out this blog post, in which Westword writer Jason Sheehan's takes New York Post columnist Cindy Adams to task for her boneheaded comments about Denver.
