Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Eat Local…at a Chain

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 26, 2008 in Business. 8 Comments

Chipotle is a chain, so I won’t eat there. But the Barracks Road Chipotle buys their pork from Polyface Farm.

My head just exploded. I guess I have to go to Chipotle now.

Dick Mountjoy Dies

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 26, 2008 in General News. 4 Comments

The voice of WINA has passed away. Dick Mountjoy died today, at the age of 61, succumbing to cancer. He first went on-air as a UVa freshman in 1965, beginning at WELK and moving to WINA in 1980, where he spent the remainder of his career. His years on air at WINA made him a beloved figure to thousands. He was first diagnosed with cancer two years ago, when a doctor found a tumor the size of an egg at the base of his tongue. Treatment was unsuccessful — the cancer returned in February of 2007. Funeral plans have not yet been announced.

To learn more about Dick, see Lindsay Barnes’ recent profile of him in The Hook.

City to Spend $5.2M to Reduce Sewage Stink

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 25, 2008 in General News. 12 Comments

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has decided to spend $5.2M to reduce the sewage stink from the Woolen Mills processing plant, Seth Rosen and Jeremy Borden write in the Progress. Three million of that will go to building an enclosed receiving statement, with scrubbers to filter outgoing air, and $2.2M will go for equipment to regularly clean the whole joint. Folks living in the area have complained for years, and rightly so — nobody wants to live near that.

Gibson Leaving the Progress

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 25, 2008 in Business and Meta News. 7 Comments

Bob Gibson is leaving the Daily Progress to take a job with the Sorensen Institute, Progress editor McGregor McCance writes on their website.

Though good for Sorensen, it’s going to leave a hole at the Progress that quite likely won’t be filled. I don’t mean that in a nostalgic way. I mean that Bob Gibson’s decades of writing and editorial work for Progress arose from the paper being lucky enough to have a political reporter disinterested in living anywhere other than Charlottesville. Though he could surely have gotten a job with larger newspapers elsewhere in the country, with better pay and many more readers, he preferred to stay here. Media General isn’t about to spend a decade training a replacement, nor are they going to pony up the necessary money to convince a seasoned political reporter to move here and write for them. Instead, they’ll surely rely on the two political reporters for the Richmond Times Dispatch to provide coverage from Richmond, and let the rotating cast of beat reporters take care of local politics. The paper is losing their political institutional memory.

In a nutshell, expect the quality of the political reporting at the Progress to decline significantly over the next couple of years.

Students Stick Around?

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 24, 2008 in UVa. 3 Comments

NBC 29 reported something yesterday not likely to surprise many: a lot of UVa students stick around after they graduate. According to the UVa Alumni Association, 7-10% of each graduating class stays in Charlottesville. JMU, on the other hand, says that 15% of their graduates live within fifty miles of campus.

While interesting, that doesn’t necessarily tell us much. Perhaps 7-10% of UVa students are from Charlottesville. It strikes me as pretty likely that 15% of JMU’s graduates are from within fifty miles of Harrisonburg. (The media reporting bad or useless statistics are a pet peeve.) That said, we all know lots of people who stuck around after getting their degree, so whatever the percentage is, it’s got to add up to a significant chunk of the population.

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