After more than a decade at the mic at UVA football and men’s basketball games, Mac McDonald announced yesterday that he is resigning his post with the Virginia Sports Network as the Cavaliers’ radio play-by-play man.

“I now have an opportunity on a couple fronts to move forward in my career and pursue a couple goals that I have had for some time,” he says in a press release. “I will always treasure my time with the players, coaches and administration.”

This marks the second time McDonald has said goodbye to Charlottesville. The first was in 1985, when he went to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to call games for Wake Forest University. In 2006, he left the morning show with Jane Foy and the late Dick Mountjoy at Virginia Sports Network flagship station WINA-AM to focus on his UVA duties.

McDonald did not immediately return calls for comment, but his football broadcast partner Frank Quayle says the news took him aback.

“He sent me an e-mail yesterday and I was (more)

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Ouch. The 17th annual Jefferson Muzzle Awards bestowed by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression to the country’s “most egregious and ridiculous censors” hits close to home this year– the independently run student newspaper at Mr. Jefferson’s university.

The Cavalier Daily earned a Muzzle after around 200 protesters sat in the paper’s office last fall to express their displeasure with Grant Woolard’s “Ethiopian Food Fight” strip. The paper apologized, forced Woolard to resign even though two managing board members had okayed the cartoon, and fell upon its unfortunately named “censorship criteria.”

Opines the TJ Center about Woolard’s firing and CBS, another Muzzle recipient, for canning Don Imus after his non-PC remarks, “[I]t appears clear that the actions were taken not because of the substance of the public’s reaction, but the amount of it.”

“I think this is something we’re obviously not pleased about, but the decision was a personnel decision,” says Cav Daily editor Elizabeth Mills. “The Cavalier Daily never wants to limit personal expression, so I hope it was a misplaced award.”

Herb Ladley, who was the editor in chief last fall during the “Food Fight” imbroglio, goes further, and calls the Muzzle a cheap shot against hardworking students, according to the Daily Progress. “It is further disconcerting that they would focus on speech, in this case, a cartoon, that had no intrinsic value,” he says.

That wasn’t the first time CD cartoons had created a firestorm. In 2006, two other Woolard cartoons about the Virgin Mary and a crucified Jesus on a Cartesian axis failed to draw yuks from the likes of Bill O’Reilly and others who said it was offensive to Christians. Last month, two other cartoons revisited those same Jesus/Mary themes and once again, the paper pulled the strips and apologized.

In a Cav Daily editorial today, the paper announces a new stance: “As long as personal belief or editorial bias isn’t at play, cutting content from the Comics page isn’t censorship– it’s editing. And that’s what we seek to do from here on out.”

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Following an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2006, Gail “For Rail” Parker is once again running to represent Virginia in the world’s most deliberative body. The 62-year-old retired Air Force officer will run under the banner of the Independent Green Party and will offer a platform of installing a light rail train system to solve the Commonwealth’s transportation woes. Parker announced today that she has the requisite 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot, which she will present to the State Board of Elections today.

Her ‘06 campaign gained national attention, and not only for the fact that she may have swayed the unprecedentedly close election to Jim Webb with her last minute endorsement. No, Parker’s legacy is greater than that; her radio ads featured (more)

 

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Charlotesville radio veteran Dick Mountjoy passed away this afternoon at age 61, after a two-year struggle with cancer.

“He died very peacefully, and he died knowing people cared for him,” says his longtime WINA co-host, Jane Foy.

For four decades, Mountjoy had been an institution on the central Virginia airwaves: first spinning Top 40 hits on local AM station WELK in June 1965 as a 19-year-old UVA first year. Soon he climbed the radio ranks to become the station’s programming director, and even became one of Charlottesville’s first television personalities, reading the news when NBC29 first began broadcasting. When WELK disappeared in the wave of new FM music stations, Mountjoy made the transition to morning talk on WINA-AM, where he remained until 2006.

That’s when he began to experience a sore throat that wouldn’t go away. After several alleged missed diagnoses, doctors eventually found a large (more)

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The Daily Progress is losing its senior reporter, the man whose 31 years of experience may be more than the total of the combined metro news squad. According to stories in this morning’s Progress and Newport News Daily Press, senior reporter Bob Gibson, who writes the influential “Political Notebook” column among other duties, is leaving the newspaper to head the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, succeeding Sean O’Brien, who left to head a new Constitutional center at Montpelier.

Gibson’s track record covering an array of topics— including an award-winning early ’90s investigation of racial sentencing disparities— has made him the “dean” of the local journalism world.

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Some of the stories that touched the hearts and minds of Charlottesville last year, including the Hook’s expose on a police department collision that provoked community outrage helped this paper earn six First Place awards last night from the Virginia Press Association.

The awards, presented at a banquet in the Hotel Roanoke, also included ten second and third place awards for the Hook, 16 awards in all— plus mention as the finalist in the Association’s top prize, the Award for Journalistic Integrity and Community Service, an honor the Hook shared last year with the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

It was Courteney Stuart’s stories on Charlottesville and Albemarle police departments’ treatment of Gerry Mitchell, the wheelchair-bound pedestrian plowed into in a crosswalk and then issued a ticket while recovering from his injuries in a local hospital, that took first place in government/public safety reporting. Stuart also took (more)

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In Staunton Circuit Court today, a hearing in the case of the town’s new adult video store After Hours Video, its owner Rick Krial (at left, with his attorney Paul Cambria answering a reporter’s questions), and a cashier Tinsley Embrey, became the latest installment of a legal drama that will extend to at least June 17, when Judge Thomas Wood set their trial date.

However, this saga could have multiple sequels, as this first trial focuses only on the first four of the combined 22 charges currently facing the store owner and his employee, leaving open the possibility of three or more additional trials. Why so many?

“You’re dealing with 24 hours’ worth of porn,” answers Staunton Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Robertson. “I’ve watched these, and if you require a jury to watch all that, they could (more)

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