"Somebody had to buy the Guardian because the Guardian wasn't going to survive."
At its 60th annual Green Eyeshade banquet near Atlanta, Ga., the Society of Professional Journalists awarded the Jackson Free Press three first-place reporting awards.
A few years ago, threatened by media giant Gannett's attempt to control local print distribution via The Distribution Network (TDN), the Jackson Free Press and other local publishers banded together to form the Mississippi Independent Publishers' Alliance (MIPA). MIPA then began a process of buying, placing and managing its own system of multi-publication news boxes around the city. Now it looks like MIPA's efforts paid off. JFP publisher Todd Stauffer tells AAN News that the Gannett-owned Jackson Clarion-Ledger has quietly picked up all their TDN boxes and apparently closed out their program. "I'm not sure if this is a trend company-wide for Gannett, but it looks like the 'control-free-distribution' chapter is no longer in the Gannett playbook for Jackson," he says.
Earlier this month, the alt-weekly launched a daily e-blast that will feature one full story along with listings and other timely content, like profiles of musicians or authors who have appearances that day. The Daily, which has the catchy slogan "Today's News...Today," will be published each day at 1 pm. "It's been twenty years since Jackson had an afternoon daily," publisher Todd Stauffer tells the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership (pdf). "We thought it would be interesting to revive that tradition, but starting from the ground up using 21st Century technology."
"I felt like the kid who was the first to be picked for the school baseball team," See publisher Todd Kosloski says, describing how he felt at Saturday's annual meeting after his alt-weekly was admitted as an AAN member.
Todd Spivak is a finalist in the small newspapers category for his examination of shady rare-coin companies that were targeting elderly investors. The Loebs, which will be awarded on June 30 in New York, are "the highest honors in business journalism."
The confidential survey (click here for PDF copy) covers a broad range of topics, including financial info, web traffic, staffing, software, marketing, email newsletters, blogs and multimedia. It was emailed to AAN publishers today. The results will be compiled by AAN staff; Jackson Free Press' Todd Stauffer will analyze the results and present the findings in a closed session at the AAN Convention in Philadelphia. Only those papers that substantially complete the survey by the close-of-business on May 12 will receive a copy of the results and be allowed to attend Stauffer's presentation at the convention.
AAN members took home a fair share of the honors last week in the First Amendment Awards competition sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists' Fort Worth pro chapter, winning a combined three first places among eight print categories in the Texas-Oklahoma contest. Fort Worth Weekly took first place in the Reporting on Open Government and student categories, while the Houston Press finished first in the Defending the Disadvantaged category. The Weekly also won an additional second-place award, and the Press took one more second- and third-place finish.
Lance Hammer's Ballast, which will compete with 15 other films in the Dramatic Competition at this year's festival, has a certain familiar alt-weekly publisher in its credits. The Jackson Free Press' Todd Stauffer was production manager for the film, which is described by Sundance as "a riveting, lyrical portrait of an emotionally frayed family whose lives are torn asunder by a tragic act in a small Mississippi Delta town."
Todd Stauffer's new paperback How to Do Everything with Your Web 2.0 Blog has just been released by McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. Press materials say the book "makes it easy to choose the blogging tools that are best for you and master the basics of blog design and template manipulation."
