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The Hook solidified its position as Charlottesville’s most award-winning weekly newspaper, as it was honored by its peers in the newspaper industry by winning 24 prizes from the Virginia Press Association— including two entries named “Best in Show.”

The awards were bestowed Saturday, March 20 at a banquet at the Association’s annual conference in Roanoke. There, the announcer lauded as “riveting” the Hook’s account ill-fated Piedmont Flight #349, a commercial airliner which crashed near Crozet in 1959. Bestowing the top statewide writing prize among specialty publications, the judge wrote, “I felt like I was on that plane.”

The Hook’s other Best in Show award went to Allison Sommers for her design. “It’s a pleasure to look at,” the judge commented, “and a pleasure to read.”

The awards, for content created (more)

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Tom Morgan’s country song includes a girl named Heather.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

When Tom Morgan packs up his up Chevy Cavalier February 27 and heads north with Led Zeppelin blasting, he’s leaving behind his morning drive time gig with 99.7 WCYK “Your Country.” He doesn’t have a job waiting for him in Philadelphia, but he does have a woman, and leaving a payin’ DJ job in a tough economy for love sounds a lot like the country tunes Morgan has been playing since 2006 at “Your Country.”

“I’m moving for love,” declares Morgan, 27.

The Roanoke native grew up with a father who “lived and breathed radio” and worked in the business for 30 years in Norfolk.

Morgan cut his country teeth in Knoxville, and that experience got him back to Virginia, where he started doing afternoons at Charlottesville’s only country station.

He says “Your Wake-Up Call with Tom and Pam” is the number one or two morning show in the area.

Monticello Media general manager Dennis Mockler can’t confirm that— as the station no longer (more)

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Authors and media watchers John Nichols and Robert McChesney discuss the state of American journalism at the Miller Center on February 19 at 11am. Nichols, a correspondent for The Nation, and McChesney, who teaches in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, co-wrote a book called Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press, 2006)

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No more Corks & Curls? From right to left, the 1928, 1930, 2007, 1908, and 1913 editions of the yearbook.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

After a nearly 120-year run, there’ll be no University of Virginia yearbook for sale this year, say UVA officials.

“The Corks & Curls yearbook is traditionally published by UVA students, but the group is currently not active,” says Karen Shaffer, UVA’s director of student services. “While they may choose to regroup and publish a yearbook in the future, there is no plan to do so in the 2009-10 academic year.”

The news came as a shocker for historian Coy Barefoot, who says he drew heavily on archival copies of Corks & Curls in compiling his own book, The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia.

“It’s a prime historical resource,” says Barefoot, who is teaching a local history course this semester. “This is just awful from a historian’s standpoint.”

However, according to Cavalier Daily editor Andrew T. Baker, the yearbook hasn’t been making much of an impression on current UVA students.

“I haven’t seen much publicity or presence from the yearbook around Grounds in the four years I’ve been here,” he says.

“I’ve tried testing the waters with some of my friends, casually mentioning that the yearbook isn’t going to be published,” says UVA student and Hook music writer Stephanie Garcia, “and no one seemed to really care.”

An even bigger shocker, according to Aaron Josephson, who serves on the executive committee of the Class of 2009, was that the historic treasure wasn’t (more)

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Air America, launched by the likes of former funnyman Al Franken, was supposed to be a progressive counterpoint to conservative talkmeisters like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Instead, the radio network abruptly pulled the plug January 21, leaving a lot of dead air including a big weekend hole at Charlottesville station 1450 WVAX.

“Our weekday line-up— Monday through Friday 6am to 1am— is not going to be affected at all,” says WVAX boss Jim Principi, “with the exception of 9pm to 10pm, Hollywood Clout.”

Principi, the general manager of the Charlottesville Radio Group, which also includes WINA, 106.1 The Corner, Z95.1, and 3WV, says the hole can be plugged (more)

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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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