LA Weekly Wins Four Press Awards

Way to go LA! You will also see that Village Voice Media took several awards.
LA Weekly led the awards among major circulation weekly newspapers again this year, grabbing four first-place honors from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies at its 14th annual AltWeekly Awards in Tucson.

The four winners were Art Director Darrick Rainey for his haunting design of a cover story about the death of a beautiful young runaway on the gritty streets of Hollywood, editor Laurie Ochoa and the LA Weekly staff for the LA People 2008 issue, food columnist Jonathan Gold for his body of work and freelancer Nancy Rommelmann for her cover story about a massive literary hoax.

Among other Village Voice Media newspapers, Phoenix New Times and The Village Voice also both won multiple first-place awards.

For the rest, go to laweekly.com

LA Times Talking About the LA Weekly

Where I do appreciate the attempt to be non-bias, this article reeks of slant by the Times. It is an obvius attempt at misdirection. Read at your own risk.
latimes.com – When the LA Weekly wrote a lengthy story last September about how little Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended to his official duties, it wasn’t plowing fresh soil.

The mayor’s exuberant fundraising and his frenetic campaigning on behalf of presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton had already received plenty of attention, in this paper and elsewhere.

The media, rightly, should do whatever it can to determine if a politician is already measuring the drapes for his next office while sitting in his current one.

But as it has with several stories in recent times, the Weekly didn’t let the facts speak for themselves in its Villaraigosa takedown.

Instead, it employed more semantic spin than Kobe Bryant puts on a jump shot, along with a prosecutorial methodology that proved much more about the declining quality of our city’s dominant alternative newspaper than it did about our attention-grasping mayor.

I got to thinking about this when the Phoenix-based company that publishes the Weekly forced the resignation of its thoughtful editor, Laurie Ochoa, late last month.

It was the latest departure in a protracted exodus by many of the Weekly’s best-known and most accomplished journalists.
Read the rest at: latimes.com.

LA Weekly, Editor to Part Ways

I liked Laurie. I only met her a few times, and brief at that, but I liked her. I hope she moves on in life and finds what she’s looking for.

After eight years as editor in chief, Laurie Ochoa is leaving LA Weekly as Village Voice Media severs more of its own legacy.

It’s unclear who instigated the move. But VVM didn’t make life easy for Ochoa.

Critics say LA Weekly’s quality began declining after it was merged into New Times (now VVM) in 2005. The alt-newspaper chain reportedly went over Ochoa’s head in late 2006 to install an unpopular news editor.

There’s no word yet on what Ochoa’s next move is — and the Weekly has no replacement lined up.

Read more at defamer.com.au.