Pamela Polston and Paula Routly will be honored at a ceremony during the New England Newspaper and Press Association conference in February.
Burlington, Vt.-based Seven Days has announced the purchase of Kids VT, a monthly parenting publication.
Paula Routly of Seven Days writes about her encounter with the Obama family while biking on Martha's Vineyard with last week.
This year's Burlington Business Award recognizes Seven Days for "for exemplary business practices, contributions to the community and promotion of a positive image for Burlington." Co-founders Pamela Polston and Paula Routly accepted the award at the Burlington Business Assocation dinner this week, where more than 400 attendees, including Vermont's governor and the mayor of Burlington, gave them a standing ovation.
Eight of the prospective members are previous applicants, and two are owned by alt-weekly veterans who had been members during a previous association with different papers. AAN members will also be asked this year to evaluate Boston's Weekly Dig and Des Moines' Cityview, the first two post-sale newspapers whose membership will be reviewed under a process established in 2004 when the association's bylaws were amended. The fate of all of these papers will be determined at the organization's next Annual Meeting, which will be held in Little Rock on Saturday, June 17, the last day of the 29th annual AAN convention.
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.
