AAN members were well-represented when the winners of the association's 2007 Better Newspaper Contest were announced this weekend. Syracuse New Times took home a total of nine awards, including first-place finishes in Best Advertising Campaign, Best House Ad/Ad Campaign, Graphic Illustration, Sports Feature, and Sports Feature Photo. Metroland won a total of seven awards, and staff writer David King was named 2007 Writer of the Year. Judges called King "a powerful writer, a master storyteller, and a thorough researcher whose convincing style grabs the reader and holds on tight -- navigating difficult subject matter, taking us to places we've never been, enabling us to understand things we never could." The New York Press came away with six awards, including first-place finishes in Best Front Page and Feature Story. The Ithaca Times took home four awards.
Last week, the New York Press got rid of its newly minted sex columnist after it was revealed that Claudia Lonow took the questions for her first column from old "Savage Love" columns. But Savage tells the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that he feels bad for Lonow, and that he thinks the "borrowing was an accident." In an interview with KING5-TV, the syndicated columnist and editor of The Stranger says that if Lonow would have just sourced the questions properly, there would've been no problem. "She just thought they were good hypotheticals and thought she could use them with impunity, and that's kinda not the way the media business works anymore," he says. Meanwhile, the Press is holding an open competition to become the paper's new sex columnist. Each week, the paper's editors will select one piece for publication, and those winners will become finalists in the quest. The new column will launch in the paper's 20th anniversary issue on April 23.
Yesterday, the Press was proudly announcing its new sex column, "Lip Service" by Claudia Lonow. Today, editor David Blum says her first column will be her last, after it was revealed that some of the questions in the column were taken from Dan Savage's "Savage Love" columns. "It had been our understanding that the questions for her first column came from friends," Blum says. "She has told us she was unaware that using questions from Savage's column was a breach of journalism ethics. She has offered her resignation, and we've accepted it. We apologize to our readers, and to Dan Savage, for this error in judgment."
In 2004, Jonathan Ames wrote and acted in a pilot for Showtime, yet it never aired. Until today. What's Not to Love? is based on Ames' 2000 memoir of the same name, which sprang from his "inflammatory, exquisitely worded, and often tastelessly brilliant columns for the New York Press," according to Showtime. The 30-minute show will debut tonight at 11:30 pm, and will be on Showtime On Demand until Jan. 15.
The Press' Becca Tucker stalked the My So-Called Life star in an effort to show just how easy it is to stalk celebrities in New York City, but Danes wasn't thrilled, according to Gawker. Jeff Berg, the chairman of International Creative Management, which represents Danes, called editor David Blum on Friday and asked him to redact online a reference to the street where she lives. "He got very hostile," Blum says, noting that Berg asked, "What are you going to do, print her phone number next?" The paper did keep her building number out of the story, by redacting it from a direct quote from New York magazine, which gives her full address online. "I'm no more inclined to print her phone number than to print her exact street address," Blum says.
A few weeks ago, the Press published a cover story claiming that the author of the New York Times Magazine's "Questions For" column had repeatedly broken the paper's code of ethics by reshuffling her Q&As and even making up questions. The story was batted around the internet, and ultimately Times public editor Clark Hoyt argued in his weekly column that Deborah Solomon's column should come with a disclaimer. Now Gawker reports that Solomon told students at Columbia University last week that the column will indeed come with a disclaimer, though the Times has not yet announced such a move and the column was disclaimer-less this past weekend.
The Washington Post media columnist's new book Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War has the Beltway buzzing after being partially leaked on the Drudge Report this weekend. "Kurtz's story was treated as big news -- but the substance, and some of the language as well, was no different from New York Press editor-in-chief David Blum's 2004 book, Tick... Tick... Tick..: The Long Life and Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes," according to Gawker. The big scoop from Kurtz was that Dan Rather threatened to take his Bush/National Guard documents -- which ultimately cost him his anchor chair at CBS -- to the New York Times, which was included in the 2005 paperback edition of Blum's book. Kurtz says he never saw that edition of the book. "Good for him for getting there first," he tells Gawker. "I'm a fanatic about giving credit, which is why my book is filled with footnotes, but you can't do that if you've never seen the information." That's all fine and good, but it leaves the New York Observer to wonder: Will Kurtz "continue to tout the anecdote as a 'scoop' in his upcoming appearances supporting the book?"
When the New York Press was sold to Manhattan Media in early August, the new CEO announced the paper would stop running "explicit" ads. The National Organization for Women and some op-ed writers took that opportunity to put more pressure on the Voice and New York magazine to also stop running the ads. The Voice "fired back by defiantly running eight naked ladies on the cover" a few weeks ago, the New York Observer reports. Editor Tony Ortega tells the Observer that the cheeky cover was his idea. "The subject of our adult ads has been brought up lately in the local press," Ortega says. "I thought the best response from the newsroom was to poke some fun at ourselves." Manhattan Media CEO Tom Allon tells the Observer that, while he thinks "the punchline was only clear to a small sliver of their readership," he's glad to have stirred up the attention. "Clearly it was a nod to us and to our decision," he says. "I was flattered that they thought that a decision we made warranted a Voice cover."
Manhattan Media has named Blum editor-in-chief of New York Press as well as editorial director of the company's community newspaper group, the New York Times reports. When he starts the job Sept. 5, Blum's first task "will be to compete more vigorously with The Voice," where he served as editor for six months ending this March. "I want to make The Press as fresh and unpredictable as possible," he says. "I tried to do that at The Village Voice, but I didn't have enough time at The Voice to achieve the goals that I had at the paper. But here I will." In his interview with the Times, Blum also takes the opportunity to take a shot at his new competition and former employer for its out-of-town ownership. "I am excited to be working with a publisher and an owner who lives in New York, who knows the city extremely well," he says. "I think that will be a big plus for The Press -- and for me."
