cvillenews.com

In what’s becoming an annual flap, the Cavalier Daily has earned the ire of Christian groups across the nation for a pair of comics that they ran on Thursday and Friday. Eric Kilanski and Kellen Eilerts’ “TCB,” which appears daily in the student paper, had one strip showing Jesus telling jokes on the cross, and another showing a post-coital conversation between God and Mary. (The comics have been removed from their website.) As Brian McNeill explains in the Progress, the paper put a comics policy into place a year ago after a similar incident, in which Grant Woolard ran a trio of comics, two mocking Christianity and one making light of Ethiopian starvation. Bill O’Reilly got involved in that kerfuffle. Then, as now, the real problem was that the comics just weren’t very funny, but that’s life at a student paper. The paper is going to review their comics policy,

I always like to point out when local media outlets manage to write about other media outlets in a way that’s both useful and even-handed. C-Ville Weekly has done so this week. Scott Weaver writes about how local media outlets covered the arrest of of Nathan Antonio Washington, the suspect in two of the serial rapes and the presumed suspect in all of them. It was a tough story to report on, due to the tension between wanting to say “the serial rapist has been caught” and the need for the restraint of sticking to the facts. As Weaver explains, some media outlets did a better job than others, with TV news taking a particularly “aggressive if not hysterical tone.” (cVillain is taking their mention rather badly. Hey, guys, you got a mention — be happy.) Weaver managed to write an informative article about other media outlets — even their direct competition in the former of The Hook — without resorting to snark or bomb-throwing. That’s great to see.

Given the ongoing discussion about local TV news, it seems appropriate to reproduce a bit of Lindsay Barnes’ interview with Ralph Nader in The Hook, on the topic of public advocacy:

It’s going on all the time on the local level, but you don’t hear about it because of the deterioration of the local news. It’s a caricature now. There are probably only four minutes of actual news out of 30 minutes. Weather isn’t news unless you have got a hurricane. News is what’s going on the community: improving neighborhoods, what local businesses are doing. But they actually advertise the weather segment like you can’t get it anywhere else. They promote these weather correspondents as seers. There’s nothing funnier than watching the weather forecast when there’s six days of sunshine. They take the temperature in two towns that are two miles apart and say, “It was 59 in this town, but it was 60 over here!” It’d be tragic if it wasn’t funny.

Because I’m contractually obligated to do so at least once a year, I must mention here the really great analysis that Coy Barefoot provided of NBC-29’s coverage in C-Ville Weekly back in the late 90s. He watched something like a year of their evening news broadcasts and calculated precisely how much of each broadcast is dedicated to particular topics — weather, sports, and particular categories of news. It painted a pretty bleak picture. The article is, sadly, unavailable online. Maybe C-Ville will dig it up and put it online some day.

The Hook reports that Beth Duffy will be going on-air at one of Gray Communications’ stations in April. She left NBC 29 in March of last year and promptly started working in sales for Gray. Of course, they didn’t hire her for her sales skills — it’s just smart business for the new guys in town to woo anchors from the competition. With the non-compete clause of her contract expiring come March, and sweeps coming up in May, it’s a cinch she’ll be on the air within weeks.

The Daily Progress released a redesigned version of their paper today, The Hook reports. It’s nothing shocking — some new fonts, narrower paper, and some more colorful features. They just redesigned in 2003, though those changes were quite a bit more striking than this update to the look.

Glory be!, o rapturous day!, etc., etc.: NBC 29 has an RSS feed. Once the Daily Progress creates one, I don’t know what I’ll complain about. (Don’t worry — I’ll find something.) Thanks to James for the tip.

UVa Dean of African-American Affairs Rick Turner retired abruptly back in July the week after pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators in a drug probe, having been assigned a probation officer and agreeing to regular drug testing. Nobody knows the slightest thing about the case other than that. Turner is famed for his blunt outspokenness, so when interviewed on WINA by equally outspoken guest host (and recently-defeated City Councilor) Rob Schilling today, fireworks could well have been expected. Instead, The Hook has Schilling didn’t once ask Turner about his conviction or abrupt exit from UVa in the hour-long interview. A Hook reporter finally called to ask the obvious question, which Turner deflected and Schilling ignored.

The story behind Turner’s guilty plea and departure from UVa will have to remain a mystery until a reporter or a radio host with some cajones has the opportunity to get an answer.

The first annual cvillenews.com award for awesomeness in journalism: Rob Seal turning a prank phone call into an interview. A 17-year-old from Waynesboro, Jake, was prank-calling people at 1 AM when they got Rob’s phone. Rob doesn’t just turn it into an interview, but makes that the hook for an interesting Progress article about the state of prank-calling telephony and anti-prank-calling telephony. Well played.

In an article about podcasting — touching on Sean Tubbs Charlottesville Podcasting Network and Albemarle County’s podcasting of BoS and School Board meetings — WCAV announces that they have launched a podcasting service on their own. It’s a proper, full-on video podcast, with an RSS feed, properly-created Quicktime video, and only minor validation problems.

I griped about their lack of a video podcast in August of last year, forecasting that they’d probably never get around to it. I’m very happy to have been wrong about that. I can’t pick up any local TV stations at home, so I expect to watch these news updates regularly.

This isn’t quite the first local media podcast (The Hook claimed that mantle last week, and The Daily Progress has promoted podcasts by Charlottesville Podcasting Network, but they haven’t any of their own) but it is, oddly, the first media outlet with an RSS feed. Bravo to the Newsplex (whose name is still ridiculous) for leading the way.

The Daily Progress‘ Bob Gibson gave a speech to the Democratic Breakfast on Saturday morning, and Sean Tubbs has made the audio available on the Charlottesville Podcasting Network. Gibson spoke primarily about politics, but also made some interesting remarks about the state of local media and the value of blogs that are well worth listening to.

Rather than just gripe about the new city website, I figure I should fix something. So I’ve created a city news RSS feed. It’s headline-only, unfortunately, because I’m too lazy to write the code that will fetch the content of each of their articles, but it’s a start. Add it to your feed reader and keep up with the city’s latest news.

Still not using a feed reader? See my handy guide to get set up.

WINA has been running a new local show from 4pm-6pm, “Charlottesville Right Now,” for the past couple of months. Now it’s being podcast by Sean Tubbs’ Charlottesville Podcasting Network, broken into bite-sized pieces by topic. This is WINA’s first podcast. WNRN has been podcasting “91 Seconds on Film” and “Wake-Up Call” for some months now.

The recent merger of second-rate networks WB and UPN, forming The CW Television Network, put Gray Television and WVIR head-to-head in fighting for the rights to an affiliation in this market. The word on the street is that the results are in, and WVIR has clearly come out on top.

WVIR (with one channel now, NBC 29) has won out, no doubt because of their market superiority to Gray’s offerings (CBS 19, ABC 16, Fox 27), and will broadcast The CW on one of their digital subchannels. (Useful only to the six of you with digital TVs.)

News Corp, no dopes they, realized that many markets featured both WB and UPN and have created My Network TV, a new network for those stations that don’t make the cut for The CW. Gray is settling for that.

The planned launch date for both new networks is September 5.

WINA has a new website but, sadly, it represents a big step back for a station that was once a local on-line pioneer. The only obvious improvements are that it’s a little prettier and there’s a hint at future podcasting (though the restoration of streaming, which they once offered, would be good).

There are three big problems. First, all old links to their news are broken, rendering every link on the web to every WINA story useless, leading to an ugly 404. Second, there is no way to link to any story on the website now — there’s not a unique page for every story any more, not even an anchor. Third, not only have the old archives disappeared, but there is no archive of the news being added on the new site. The result is that their stories can’t be linked to, and they’ve essentially excused themselves from participating in the web. I guess I’ll have to wait for other media outlets to carry stories and write ‘em up then, since I can’t link to WINA’s site.

Amazingly, there’s still no RSS feed, something that I can’t really fathom. Any news outlet without a subscription mechanism (RSS, RDF, Atom, whatever) is stuck in the mid-90s. I don’t know why they’d put a penny into altering their website without starting with a feed. So I’ve modified my screen-scraped RSS feed to work with their new code base.

Maybe they’ll go back to their old site. This one sucks. If you agree, you should vote in the poll on their sidebar and tell ‘em it’s no good.

(Via Jim Duncan)

03/09 Update: WINA tells me that the site’s not done — it’s a work in progress. Keep your fingers crossed that all of these things will be fixed.

The Daily Progress has a blog.

These are words that I never thought I would write.

Laura Bland, their Online Content Coordinator, appears to have dragged Bryan McKenzie into the 90s kicking and screaming. It’s got an RSS feed, an Atom feed, categories, monthly archives, comments, trackbacks, and reasonable URLs. Unfortunately, it also has smiley-face graphics, there’s no blogroll, and only Bryan McKenzie is contributing thus far. But, my Lord, what a start.

And just four years and ten months after cvillenews.com started! Seriously, I thought it would take a lot longer.

I’m happy to have added the Daily Progress blog to Charlottesville Blogs. Welcome to the Charlottesville blogosphere!

Two separate sources have told me that NBC 29 anchor Beth Duffy has submitted her resignation, effective March 1. I’ve heard two different stories of her plans — either she’s getting out of the business but staying in town or she’s been wooed by CBS 19, though I’m more inclined to trust the latter. Of course, I’m in no position at all to authenticate this, so it’s best to regard this as rumor.

Losing a reporter is one thing, but Duffy is the face of NBC 29, as she has been for a few years now. And, more than any other individual factor, it’s a familiar face that gets people to remain loyal to a station. If she were to leave, that would be another minor blow to the station that has lost veterans Robert Van Winkle and Dave Cupp in the past few years, making it all the easier for viewers to flirt with one of the new stations. And if she were going to CBS 19… Well, that would be a major coup for them.