Jenna Arianna is the only Cavalier in Playboy’s current “Girls of the ACC.”
PHOTO BY COURTENEY STUART

When the latest issue of Playboy hit the stands last Friday, UVA students got a revealing glimpse of one of their own: Jenna Arianna, a blond linguist who eschews Greek in favor of Latin.” In fact, the lovely Jenna Arianna (whose last name is Llewellyn) is a Fourth Year art major who kept her audition a secret from even her sorority sisters until she’d been selected.

“I didn’t want to jinx it,” she says, adding that encouragement from both parents and one of UVA’s previous “Girls of the ACC” convinced her.

“She made it sound like the coolest thing ever, and she was right,” says Llewellyn, who was flown to Chicago by the magazine for her photo shoot last spring.

Jenna’s encouraging Playboy predecessor is Amanda Paige Gellar— who first appeared in the magazine’s October 2004 edition, went on to (more)

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Jeff Parsons and Ian Saul have resuscitated gossip blog Cvillain.com.
PHOTO COURTESY IAN SAUL

Less than two months after its founder shut it down, two-year-old Charlottesville social gossip blog cVillain.com is back with new webmasters but the same mission.

“What built the concept was the active reporting, restaurant reviews, getting people excited about what’s going on in Charlottesville today,” says Ian Saul, 28, an IT consultant who, along with his business partner Jeff Parsons, took the site over from founder Kyle Redinger.

Saul says he’d long enjoyed reading cVillain and participating in some of the social events the site organized. But over time, he says, the online atmosphere strayed from its original purpose as comments grew more personal and off-topic.

“People in their mid-to late 30s found it to be kind of hipster-ish,” he says, adding that he and 45-year-old Parsons “want it to be much more accessible to all age-ranges– to try to get better sense of overall community rather than the one specific hipster-esque ideology that it got tagged with.”

Much of the site’s future content, Saul hopes, will be the product of its readers-turned-reporters. (more)

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Like so many first dates, this one took place at a coffee shop– Café Cubano, to be exact. But like many a romance, this one also includes its share of fireworks— including worries that letting a group of growth watchdogs write stories for the daily newspaper could skew coverage.

The cash-strapped Daily Progress had been eyeing Charlottesville Tomorrow’s form, and admired the nonprofit’s passion for covering government meetings. And Charlottesville Tomorrow, mired in the internet-only zone, couldn’t help but be excited about getting read by a much larger audience.

The pair’s backgrounds were so different. How would the parents of the growth watchdog feel (more)

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Bart Isley and Ryan Yemen tap into the interest in high school sports.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

As the economy has tanked, traditional print media is gasping for air. So why not start a new niche magazine? That was the thinking of two former Daily Progress sports writers. On Thursday, August 27, the high school sports-centric Scrimmage Play hits the stands.

Bart Isley and Ryan Yemen, both 25, know all too well the dire predictions for print publications.

“Print is failing because news can be covered so easily on CNN,” says Yemen.

“Our theory,” says Isley, “is print media can still work if it’s of high quality and focuses on certain things. Our coverage is local and very specific.”

With the help of stringers, Isley and Yemen plan (more)

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Mac McDonald starts broadcasting August 31 and takes his former UVA play-by-play colleague Adam Gottschalk’s afternoon slot on WKAV while Gottschalk moves his sports talk to the morning.
MCDONALD PUBLICITY PHOTO, GOTTSCHALK  BY JAY KUHLMANN

More than a year ago, Mac McDonald abruptly left his job doing sports radio play-by-play on WINA radio. Almost as unexpectedly, he’s back on the air starting Monday, August 31, not for UVA nor his old pals at WINA, but with his own drive-time syndicated show airing on the competition AM station, WKAV Sports Radio 1400.

McDonald says he was about to move to Orlando after working on a book for the past year. “I had people pushing me to get back on radio and do (more)

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Michelle Obama takes the girls on an unofficial visit to Monticello.
PHOTO BY HOOK STAFF

First Lady Michelle Obama, First Daughters Malia and Sasha and First Mother-in-law Marian Robinson dropped in July 23 on Charlottesville’s First Tourist Attraction, Monticello, and NBC29 snagged the story– with video.

The Obama women took (more)

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Blu acknowledges the Blue Ridge while leaving opportunities for expansion open.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Even during robust economic times, the Shenandoah Valley can be a tough market for alternative papers– or dailies.

With print publications dropping like flies, is it really the best time to launch a monthly arts-and-culture tabloid?

“The downturn in the economy is when everyone turns to local and community activities,” says Blu Magazine publisher/senior editor Jason Grogan. “The community needs (more)

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We don’t live here anymore.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Fewer than two years ago, WHTJ hosted a splashy kick-off party for its Terri Allard-hosted program, Charlottesville Inside-Out. Today, the public broadcasting station licensed for Charlottesville still has Allard, but the rest of its local programming has gone dormant— along with its local office space.

One of the hard-hit Community Idea Stations out of Richmond, WHTJ— which once had five employees— recently closed its office at 528 East Maint Street, across from City Hall. The payroll has shrunk to two, and they both work from home. Former general manager D.J. Crotteau left (more)

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Blogger and digital plagiarism watchdog Waldo Jaquith.
FILE PHOTO BY HOOK STAFF

Put a blog in Waldo Jaquith’s hands, even a literary magazine’s blog, and there’s no telling what can happen. Last week, the Virginia Quarterly Review employee called out Wired editor and best-selling author Chris Anderson on VQR’s blog for lifting whole passages from Wikipedia and other sources for Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” something many other reviewers, including New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, appeared not to have noticed.

The post came with a mea culpa from Anderson— he was told before-hand that his book was going to be challenged— who claimed that it was a mistake and that he  and his publisher had “forgotten” to cite the passages.

Jaquith’s post made an immediate impact, having generated 177 comments to date from people— including Anderson— arguing (more)

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Photographer Matthew Rosenberg’s image of tiny downtown music/art venue The Garage is the subject of his lawsuit.
PHOTO BY MATTHEW ROSENBERG

It was a tiny picture of a tiny music venue, and it was posted just twice on a local blogger’s site, but the aggrieved photographer who snapped it says compensation needs to be made— compensation to the tune of $385,000.

The federal lawsuit filed May 15 demands as much from gossip site cVillain.com and its owner, Kyle Redinger. The litigant, Charlottesville photographer Matthew Rosenberg, claims Redinger violated his copyright by hosting and showing the thumbnail image without permission.

“If filing a lawsuit over something so trivial is not overkill,” says veteran intellectual property lawyer Sheldon Parker, “then I don’t know what would constitute overkill.”

Parker, who is not (more)

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In its first week of sales, Parachute’s debut album Losing Sleep made it to #40 on the Billboard albums chart.
PUBLICITY PHOTO

After nearly a year of anticipation, the numbers are finally in, and a Charlottesville-based band’s debut album is officially a hit. Members of Parachute learned Thursday, May 21 that Losing Sleep entered at #40 on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart.

“It’s way better than we had expected,” says frontman Will Anderson. “We had a day off, so we were all in different places when we found out, and we were texting each other like crazy.”

The news comes a week after the album got an early release on the iTunes Music Store, and quickly shot to #1 on the digital vendor’s charts. This was due in part to the strength of the band’s second single “Under Control,” which iTunes offered as a free download for the week.

According to Anderson, seeing his band’s name atop of the iTunes chart was a stunning moment.

“When we went #1 on iTunes,” says Anderson, “that was a (more)

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The 2009 Emily Couric leadership scholars are: (front) Lily Erb, Tandem; Allie Cooper, Monticello High; Effie Nicholaou, Western Albemarle; Emma Yackso, winner of the $15,000 scholarship, Charlottesville High; Christina Horton, Albemarle High; (back row) Megan Thomas, Murray High; Ladi Smith, $5,000 merit award winner, St. Anne’s-Belfield; Kimberly Dozier; Devon Ryan, Miller School; Madeline Zimmer, Renaissance School, and Brea Thomas, Covenant School.
PHOTO BY MARY JOHNSON

Three years after CBS reporter and UVA alum Kimberly Dozier was seriously injured by a car bomb in Iraq, the journalist talked about her work and recovery to a crowd that included John Grisham and Congressman Tom Perriello at the May 18 Emily Couric Leadership Scholarship Awards luncheon.

“Please don’t risk my life if we’re not going to make air,” Dozier recounted her cameraman, Paul Douglas, saying. The report on what it was like for U.S. troops in Baghdad was supposed to make the airwaves on Memorial Day 2006, but a car bomb killed Douglas and soundman James Brolan, and left Dozier with her legs looking like “hamburger,” she said.

Dozier was presented the Women’s Leadership Award, which has gone to former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Caroline Kennedy, and Dozier’s CBS News colleague Katie Couric.

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