AAN members won 15 first-place awards in the California Association of Newspaper Publishers' annual contest, led by Palo Alto Weekly, which took home five firsts. Chico News & Review placed first in in three categories; Pacific Sun won two; and Metro Santa Cruz, North Coast Journal, Sacramento News & Review, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Santa Barbara Independent each finished in first in one category. The awards were presented in a ceremony Saturday evening.
As we reported last month, Tak Toyoshima's comic strip, which originated out of the Dig and appears in many alt-weeklies, has been picked up by the United Feature Syndicate and will become a daily feature in papers nationwide beginning July 16. In an interview with the San Francisco-based Japanese-American newspaper Nichi Bei Times, Toyoshima talks about his goal for his new expanded audience: "I want readers to see a strip that isn't afraid to talk about things that most cartoon cats wouldn't touch but also feel like they are not being hit over the head by some overbearing agenda."
The McClatchy-owned and Idaho Statesman-operated free weekly known as Thrive (nee Thr!ve) has printed its last issue, New West Boise reports. Thrive editor David Parker and some staffers will remain at the Statesman, he says in a farewell note. Thrive, which competed with AAN member Boise Weekly, began in October 2002 as one of a few tests in different markets by Gannett (the paper's original owner), which wanted to see if such faux-alts could flourish, according to New West. MORE: Boise Weekly offers its take on Thrive's demise: "No more fun, fun, fun articles about local sports enthusiasts. Gone are the always-positive restaurant advertorials."
In a letter to AAN News, ex-OC Weekly editor Will Swaim maintains that The Nation's "[Jon] Wiener did a fine job" conveying the paper's "loss ... of independence" under Village Voice Media, but claims that Wiener got at least one thing wrong. "[The article reports that] I told Jon Wiener that OC Weekly's film coverage was run out of Denver. I didn't say that," writes Swaim, now the publisher of Long Beach alt-weekly The District. MORE: In a letter to The Nation published on the OC Weekly blog, Gustavo Arellano says that "many of the overarching conclusions" reached by Wiener in the piece "are ludicrous."
Richard Hart resigned last week, the News & Observer reports. The editor of the 50,000-circulation Durham, North Carolina, weekly tells the N&O that he chose to resign. "It's a tough job, and I was ready to move on," he says. "I'm very proud of the work of the staff and the awards the paper received during my time there."
Writing for the defendant newspaper and its parent company, Village Voice Media, Will Harper reports that the Weekly said it sold ads below cost for "pro-competitive" reasons like generating new sales and "increas(ing) the customer base in a severely depressed market." VVM's motion, which was filed last week in response to the Bay Guardian's Oct. 2004 lawsuit, also asserted that the newspaper chain never engaged in a conspiracy to put its Bay Area competitor out of business. And in a unique counter-argument, the Weekly claimed that by filing suit, the Bay Guardian is trying to force it to reduce editorial expenses in order to adhere to a business model that relies heavily on freelancers and unpaid interns, instead of full-time reporters. THE BAY GUARDIAN'S REPORT: Judge advises attorneys to prepare for October trial even as summary-judgment motion is filed.
The alt-weekly put out a call for local musicians to create 30-second jingles, and plenty responded. There are now 26 jingles in the running for the possibility of being featured in local radio ads for the Weekly. Readers are currently listening to and voting on the best jingles online, and the winner of the reader's poll will also receive a $500 prize. "We will probably cut the [radio] spot with an all-star band in different genres," says Bill Shreve, the Weekly's director of Marketing and Advertising. He adds: "We've gotten a pretty good buzz off this thing."
Fishbowl LA says that Jon Wiener's piece on LA Weekly and Village Voice Media is, among other things, a "cry from an old media guy in a new media world." Regarding Wiener's criticism of the paper's slight reporting on the May Day fiasco in MacArthur Park, which was his evidence of the paper's "big editorial shift to the right," Fishbowl LA points him to the internet, where the Weekly published nearly 4,000 words on the subject on top of the "330-word piece" Wiener cited. Longtime film reviewer (and current OC Weekly staffer) Luke Y. Thompson also tells Fishbowl that "the film reviews haven't been assigned out of Denver for as long as I've been a part of it," as former OC Weekly editor Will Swaim had told Wiener. Meanwhile, New Times Broward-Palm Beach columnist Bob Norman, in a letter to Romenesko, says the story "is exactly the kind of thing Village Voice Media is moving the alt-weekly world away from -- presumptuous ideological essays with much teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing but very little actual reporting or common sense."
The paper took first in the General News/Enterprise Reporting, and placed in three other categories. The awards were presented by the Hawaii chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists Friday evening.
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