Archive for the 'Meta News' Category

Charlottesville Tomorrow Teams Up with C-Ville Weekly

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 29, 2013 in Business, Education and Meta News. Closed Tags: , , , .

Charlottesville Tomorrow is extending its content sharing to a new publication, they’ve announced in an unsigned story, to include the publication of education stories in C-Ville Weekly. No money is changing hands in the agreement, which includes a cooperative venture to put together a voter guide for city and county school board elections in November. The collaboration gets underway in June. Simultaneous to this news is Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Kickstarter-based effort to raise $17,000 to fund a new education-reporter position. The expansion into education marks a noted increase in the scope of the mission of the non-profit, which has focused primarily on development-related issues since its 2005 founding.

It was nearly four years ago that the online-only publication struck a similar deal with the Daily Progress, in a similar deal: the Progress prints the organization’s voter guide, in exchange for being able to run any Charlottesville Tomorrow stories that they want.

Cavalier Daily Reducing to Twice-Weekly

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 25, 2013 in Meta News and UVa. Closed

A year after eliminating their Friday edition, the Cavalier Daily plans to print just two issues each week, Nieman Journalism Lab reports. Beginning with the fall term, they’ll print a “newsmagazine” on Monday and Thursday. The rest of the week they’ll be online-only. While this saves the paper a huge amount of money, since their major cost is printing, it also eliminates their major source of revenue—print advertising. The shift also surely reflects the reality how UVA students expect to receive news, which is via Twitter, Facebook, websites, etc. Last year’s Dragas/Sullivan saga proved to be an ideal opportunity for the publication’s staffers to embrace digital media, and their Facebook page, Twitter feed, and website quickly became essential sources of information for the many thousands of people trying to keep up with the fast-emerging story over the course of many weeks.

Hook Sued, But Case Promptly Dropped

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 20, 2012 in Law and Justice and Meta News. Closed

Here’s a bit of old news that’s new to me, from Courthouse News Service: The Hook was sued for libel in September, but the lawsuit was withdrawn the very next day. Curtis Ofori claimed a dozen defamatory statements in a December 2011 article about UVA student Kathryn Russell and her alleged rape by Curtis Ofori. The possibility of a libel suit was even pondered within the article, with attorney David Heilberg speculating that Ofori would be unlikely to sue, because he wouldn’t want the resulting public scrutiny of the matter. With the lawsuit dropped, that is presumably the end of the matter.

Ownership Change, New Editor at The Hook

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 19, 2012 in Business and Meta News. 19 Comments

Two years after The Hook and C-Ville Weekly merged their parent companies, founder Hawes Spencer is selling his shares and stepping down as editor. Senior Editor Courteney Stuart, a founding staffer at the publication, will become the new editor, effective January 1. In contrast with the acrimonious 2002 split that calved The Hook from C-Ville Weekly, this is by all accounts a friendly parting of ways, with Spencer off for new opportunities. In a phone conversation with Spencer this morning, he expressed confidence in Stuart, and is clearly enthusiastic about seeing his newspaper continue after his eleven-year time at the helm.

The Hook Runs an Unusual Apology

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 4, 2012 in Meta News. 8 Comments

Hook reporter Courteney Stuart has published an apology for the tone of her coverage of the murder-suicide on Stony Point last week. The story—revised today—was titled “Dark Designs: Did Satan Play a Role in the Stony Point Murder-Suicide?” The headline played up what appears to be a relatively minor element of the story—that the suspect was a member of an online community of Satanists—and Stuart writes that “the tone of the article, a lack of context, and the original headline were insensitive.” (The facts of the story are not in question.) Complicating things for Stuart and The Hook somewhat, one of the victims was an employee of Hook sister publication, C-Ville Weekly.

This is the first such apology that I can summon to mind in more than a decade of watching local media pretty closely. Apologies for factual mistakes are not uncommon, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a local media outlet say “our facts were right, but we still got this wrong.”

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