Creative Loafing (Sarasota) food writer and restaurant critic Brian Ries is taking over the top editor position at the paper, replacing Cooper Levey-Baker, who has left to edit the Florida Independent website. Ries says he will continue his food writing, which leads to an interesting conundrum: he will try to maintain his anonymity while performing a much more public role as the paper's editor. "Soon, there will be plenty of pictures online that restaurants could use to identify me, if they want to go to the bother," he writes. "In my experience, restaurants don't perform well when they know a critic is in the dining room, perhaps because the pressure gets to them. And I won't make it easy for them -- I'll continue to make reservations under another name, use an alias credit card, and shave my legs to match the summer dresses I plan on wearing as a disguise."
"SF Weekly has always been your essential guide for where to go, where to eat, and what to do," the paper says, "and now we have, well, an app for that." The free app features easily searchable event and restaurant listings as well as editorial coverage of nightlife happenings and slideshows.
New York City is facing a new class action lawsuit over the NYPD's use of quotas to get officers to issues summonses and stop-and-frisk people, and the suit reportedly cites some of the quotations which appeared in the Village Voice's NYPD Tapes series. The series, which features secret tapes made by a former cop, shows that precinct supervisors order their officers to hit quotas for tickets and stop-and-frisks, and threaten them with disciplinary action if they don't comply.
Random Lengths News was approved for a grant to fund Armando Segovia to assist the paper in its investigative news reporting of the paper's large immigrant community. Potential investigations include examining the impact on this community by the area's clean trucks program, as well as various aspects of the Mexican government's "war on the drug cartels." Segovia is a previous recipient of a multimedia fellowship at The Coloradoan, and also has interned at a variety of publications, including El Paso Times, El Conquistador and Al Día.
Oklahoma Gazette also received one of the two grants for this cycle for its proposal for Rachel Bradley to serve as the paper's marketing/PR intern. Bradley, an African American student at the University of Oklahoma, will help the paper with its 2010-2011 marketing plan, writes Marketing Director Jill Brown, which "includes some initiatives targeted toward increasing minority readership and community involvement. We are currently not very knowledgeable about these emerging markets, and feel that Rachel would be an asset to the team." Bradley has received a variety of awards for scholastic achievement, and also has worked as an event intern for The CE Group in San Antonio, Texas, and and as a teacher for the First Baptist Church Kaleidoscope After School program in Norman, Oklahoma.
AAN's Diversity Grant Program awards two $1,250 grants twice annually. The program was instituted by the association in 2001 to help alternative weeklies hire and train top-quality minority journalists. The grants are administered through AAN's Diversity Committee.
Nine seats on the AAN Board of Directors will be up for election this year at the association's annual meeting in Toronto. Prior to the election, The board of directors will consider adopting bylaw amendments that would reduce the board of directors (which now totals 18) to 16 by eliminating two of the four at-large positions.
The annual meeting will be held in Toronto on Saturday, July 17, during the final day of AAN's upcoming convention.
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On May 27, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter signed Senate Bill 193 into law, making Colorado the ninth state to ban the shackling of inmates during labor and childbirth. The bill was inspired by Boulder Weekly editor Pamela White's investigation into the treatment of pregnant inmates in state prisons and jails. White was also key in drafting the legislation and pushing the bill forward. "I've written lots of news articles and opinion columns. I've written nine published novels," she says. "But I'd never written a bill."
Index Newspapers (parent company of The Stranger and Portland Mercury) and Night & Day Studios have released a Savage Love iPhone app, which provides "an interactive take on the love, sex, and relationship advice Dan Savage has been serving up for nearly 20 years," as the press release puts it. The app features a "Question of the Day" updated each afternoon, previous columns and podcasts, and exclusive text and video content. "We thought for sure that the app store would reject this but they approved in record time," Stranger publisher Tim Keck says. "I guess we've lost our touch." The app sells for $1.99, and is tagged in the iTune app store as having "Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity," "Frequent/Intense Profanity or Crude Humor," and "Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes." In other words, everything you love about Savage Love to begin with.
The cartoonist behind "This Modern World" was tapped by Pearl Jam to create the cover for the band's most recent album, Backspacer. Now it has gone gold after selling a half-million units, and the band thanked Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins) with a framed gold record. "I had no idea they were going to pull me up on stage last week in Hartford, and I had no idea this was in the works. It was an incredibly thoughtful gesture on their part, and I was as moved as you might imagine," Perkins says. "And now I have a gold record, with my name on the plaque and everything -- how cool is that?"
ProPublica director of communications Mike Webb will be on hand at the Toronto Convention to talk about how you can use their data and resources for your own investigative work.
The nonprofit news organization has rolled out a number of collaborative tools since its January 2008 launch, including a "reporting recipe" for how to investigate state boards that license nurses, pharmacists, mortgage brokers and other professionals. That specific tool was borne out of an investigation ProPublica did of California's nursing board that found broad breakdowns in the state's regulation of registered nurses.
Other resources the organization offers include the Stimulus Recovery Tracker and a "Reporting Matchmaker," the first of which hooked home loan modification applicants up with local journalists.
With newsrooms getting smaller, partnerships and collaboration are becoming hot topics in journalism. With a little guidance from Webb, you could well be on your way to a number of solid features that put local names and numbers on the big issues facing the nation.
The Connecticut alt-weekly this week introduced "High Concept," a new pot advice column that aims to "address questions of all the smokers out there" in an "entertaining but also useful and informative" way. "We're hoping there will be smart questions about neuroscience, memory studies, the law, high quality, pot culture, etc.," Advocate managing editor John Adamian says in an email.
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