Julie Jargon has won second place in the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism for her series, "The War Within," published by Westword. The series, which also won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Certificate this year, investigated patterns of sexual assault and institutional cover-up at the United States Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs. The Martin Award, now in its 16th year, is based out of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism where namesake John Bartlow Martin concluded his career in investigative journalism.
A free daily newspaper launched last fall, A.M. Journal Express, lost financial support from investors, the Associated Press reports. The Journal Express, published by American Consolidated Media, competed with Quick, a free daily still being published by The Dallas Morning News.
Doug Vanderlaan, of Jacksonville, Fla., didn't like what he was hearing on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show. For two years he waged a campaign to get Bubba and all his lewd talk off the air, Jane Akre reports in Orlando Weekly. The result: Bubba was fired, his station (owned by Clear Channel) was hit with the largest fine in Federal Communications Commission history, and Clear Channel got on its knees before Congress.
Sometimes word of mouth is a more effective way of promoting a paper than a print ad. That's why some alternative newsweeklies send street teams out to bars, movie theaters and cultural events to hand out freebies and stir up interest in their papers. When they dispatch their street teams to public places, alt-weeklies like NUVO and Boston's Weekly Dig are relying on a centuries-old marketing technique the music industry revived.
In an interview with A.J. Daulerio of The Black Table, New York Press editor-in-chief Jeff Koyen doesn't disappoint those who expect from him "a certain level of infamy," as Daulerio puts it. Koyen claims the alt-weekly model "is dead or dying," and the aging, liberal editors of those "stale, homogenous products" have lost touch with the young. He admits the Press, too, was aging badly, but he's trying to convert it back into "a venue for emerging talent." The result is more and younger readers, he says.
Metroland writer Travis Durfee spent the past month taking bucket baths, sleeping on mats and eating lamb kabob as he traveled throughout the Central Asian nation of Afghanistan. In the small city of Kunduz, he observed the crush of patients hoping for an appointment with an eye-doctor's assistant during a two-week camp run by the National Organization for Ophthalmic Rehabilitation. An estimated 2 percent of the country's population is blind, many of them from treatable conditions.
Jeff Koyen, editor-in-chief of New York Press, introduces the weekly's new design and structure by way of reminiscing about his first nine years with the paper and the lessons he learned on his journey up the masthead. NYP's new look, which hit the stands March 31, was developed and shepherded by creative director Nick Bilton.
Orlando Weekly writer Deb Berry never had much use for feminism, until she joined the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C., and fell in with a group of people who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore. She had to leave her protest sign, "John Ashcroft Is a Sexually Repressed Woman-Hater," behind in a broken-down bus and rely on her voice to respond to anti-abortion protesters who lined the route.
Because state law keeps secret most accusations made to the New Mexico state dental board, the public has little opportunity to find out if their dentist has been the subject of complaints, Brendan L. Smith writes in the Santa Fe Reporter. The paper's examination of some publicly available records uncovers cases in which the board approved licenses for dentists who had been convicted in other states of molestation and drug abuse. The patients of one Santa Fe dentist accuse her doing unnecessary and substandard full-mouth reconstructions.
