Bill Jensen is leaving Beantown to take command of Web operations for Village Voice Media. The math is simple: Jensen's departure is a loss for the Phoenix and a gain for VVM. "It's always a disappointment to lose solid talent,"says Peter Kadzis, executive editor of Phoenix Media/Communications Group. VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey seems to have had his sights set on Jensen; according to the Phoenix, Jensen was offered, and declined, the job of editing the Village Voice earlier this year. “Like Vito Corleone, Mike Lacey must have made Bill an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Kadzis says. In a press release, Lacey and CEO Jim Larkin announce that Jensen's "arrival coincides with a major expansion of staffing as we move to hire a new group of dedicated Web editors and designers."
Geov Parrish, a Seattle Weekly columnist who resigned in August, is airing his grievances with the alternative weekly. In a column in Eat the State!, a twice-monthly Washington state political and opinion journal, Parrish laments the acquisition of his paper's parent company, Village Voice Media, late last year by New Times. "The new Seattle Weekly is being run by an enormous corporation that will run it the same way they'd run a widget factory," he writes. While much of Parrish's criticism of the reconstituted, 17-paper VVM is familiar, he offers an up-close-and-personal account of the impact of the merger on a single paper.
After battling cancer and pneumonia, pioneering editor Clay Felker, 78, has entered a nursing home. The founder of New York magazine exerted a seminal influence in new journalism and the alternative press. Felker owned and edited The Village Voice from 1974 to 1977, and founded California-based alternative magazine New West. But not everyone saw his influence as benevolent. A capsule history in The Village Voice's 50th anniversary issue claimed that Felker "dulled the Voice's radical edge by crimping the style of some of its more free-spirited writers, giving undue prominence to fluffy lifestyle pieces, and taking articles off the front page." One-time protégé James Brady pays tribute in Forbes magazine.
Three Village Voice Media writers won first-place awards in the Association of Food Journalists' annual Awards Competition, it was announced at the group's conference on Saturday (press release here in PDF format). Jonathan Kauffman of East Bay Express won the Restaurant Criticism category in the division for papers with circulation under 150,000; Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly won the same category in the circulation 150,000-300,000 division. In addition, Ron Russell of SF Weekly won first place in Food News Reporting, circulation 150,000-300,000. They will each receive a $300 cash prize.
John Wilcock was already an experienced British journalist when he began writing "The Village Square" column for The Village Voice in 1955. These days, the 78-year-old writes a weekly column in The Montecito Journal, self-publishes a monthly zine called The Ojai Orange, and produces a public access television show. The twisted tale of his life, as revealed to the Ventura County Reporter, also includes stints as a travel writer for The New York Times and Frommer's, a columnist for LA Weekly, and an apprentice to a witch. Wilcock was friends with Andy Warhol and Abbie Hoffman, but says he "never really got along very well" with Norman Mailer, because Mailer was "a bit self-important."
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