MEDIA

Best Music Radio

WEQX 102.7 FM

Whether it’s attributable to changes in staffing or a shakeup in the lunar cycle, something really good is happening over in Manchester. The station’s live stream is finally back online. They continue making high marks for the new-music show Download, and they’ve added super syndicated shows like Paul Oakenfold Presents and Passport Approved (which reminds us of the long-missed Rock Over London) to their schedule. Best of all, they moved their local-music program, EQX-Posure, to a more- accessible Sunday-night slot (see below), making it easier for local bands to hear their shit on the radio. Good work, team.

Best Locally Minded Disc Jockey

Jason Irwin

102.7 WEQX

Glens Falls resident Irwin pulls the Sunday shift in EQX land, hauling his butt into the wilds of Vermont for a full day of broadcasting. Late at night, he unfurls his pet project and labor of love, the one-hour EQX-Posure. That is, it used to be late at night, but his time slot has been bumped up to the prime-time 7 PM. Irwin packs as many singles as he can from local groups into that hour, and a bulk of those songs come from Capital Region bands. Irwin’s attention to local groups has even prompted the station to play a song by a local act most weeknights at 11 PM. No other DJ in the area gives so much exposure to so many local musicians—pretty darn good for commercial radio. But then again, the fiercely independent WEQX has always marched to a different drummer than the corporate chain stations. Anyone who’s supported local musicians (ask any Metroland scribe) knows that it can be a thankless task. But Irwin seems more than up to the challenge.

Best Arts Radio Show

The Book Show

WAMC-FM

Each week on The Book Show, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina talks with an author about their work. It sounds simple, but this is much more than typical bookchat. Gerzina is a thoughtful reader, and her interviews are engaging and probing. (If she has a bad reaction to an aspect of a book, she brings it up with the author; conversely, if she especially likes something, she’ll ask about that, too.) There is a pleasing variety in the guests, as Gerzina interviews authors from a variety of fiction genres, as well as biographers, journalists and essayists. There really is nothing else in its class.

Best Musical Curiosity Shop (on the Radio)

Tribute

WRPI-FM

Kevin Roberts has been hosting Tribute every Thursday evening on WRPI for decades now, maintaining much the same format. He features one musical artist and tells informative, often fascinating stories about their career. Sometimes it’s someone so well-known you think there’s nothing more to learn about them (like, say, Bing Crosby). Sometimes it’s an unknown R&B singer so good it makes you question your own musical knowledge: “If I’m so damned smart why have I never heard of this singer before?” Either way, Roberts, with his calm, almost hypnotic voice, makes you feel like you’re sharing a great musical discovery—which you probably are.

Best Geek Radio

VGMemories

WRPI-FM

Believe it or not, video-game music is blowing up. Yes, soundtracks from actual video games. A series of video-game music concerts were recently presented at the Hollywood Bowl. If you’d like to get hip, tune in to WRPI any Tuesday between 7 and 10 PM for VGMemories. You’ll hear everything from majestic symphonic scores to cheesy synthesizer music to ghastly examples of bad voice-acting. In between, you’ll hear the knowledgeable hosts (i.e., the geeks) discuss the games the music was composed for. If you’re still unconvinced, think of this genre as the new film music; since it’s largely from Japan and not Hollywood, it mostly doesn’t suck.

Best Fill-In DJ

Reszin Adams

WRPI-FM

Given the number of awards we’ve bestowed on them, it’s clear we’re fans of WRPI-FM. And one of the odd things we like is the way they deal with the vagaries of being a university-based, volunteer operation. After all, semesters end, people move on and programming gaps will happen. When they do, WRPI can rely on local activist Reszin Adams to save the day. Like a radio superwoman, Adams fills in for AWOL DJs or cancelled shows by reading stories from progressive journals and magazines that we’ve intended to read but haven’t. Adams is refreshingly straightforward and informative.

Best TV News

NewsChannel 13

WNYT

This crew wins every year. Why? It’s possible to watch NewsChannel 13 without feeling like you’re either being pandered to with an excess of dopey “viewer service” features or treated like an idiot with a lot of inane nonnews tie-ins to entertainment programming. (Though we have to give props to second-place finishers Channel 10, WTEN-TV, for being mostly serious, too; like Avis, they try harder.) NewsChannel 13 anchors Lydia Kulbida and Jim Kambrich engage viewers without pandering, and always manage to strike the right tone whether it’s dog-bites-man fluff or something deadly serious. A class act.

Best TV News Reporter

Kumi Tucker

WNYT

Turn on NewsChannel 13 at 11 PM on a weeknight, and you can probably bet on seeing Kumi Tucker doing what she does best: on-the-scene, fair, straightforward reporting. Tucker, who used to work for WNBC in New York City, graduated from Princeton, and lived and worked in Tokyo for a while before coming to work for Channel 13 here in the Capital Region. We love watching Tucker because we can tell that she likes her job and wants to do it well.

Best Daily Newspaper

The Post-Star

Glens Falls

The first thing you notice about The Post Star is what an appealing-looking newspaper it is, with its nice newsprint, clear, easy-to-read typeface and first-rate layout. (Hey, aesthetics are important.) Happily, The Post Star has the substance to match the packaging. They have solid coverage of local news such as the dam break in Fort Ann, and their features, like the recent series on domestic abuse, are well-researched and written. And they’re hip enough to run album reviews of stuff like Sleater-Kinney and Yo La Tengo in the arts section. A pleasure to read.

Best Daily Jab at the Times Union

We’re mixed on the redesign of our Schenectady-based daily, but we definitely get a daily smile out of its new tagline: “The Locally Owned Voice of the Capital Region.” While we pride ourselves on our own local ownership, we know who the Gazette has its sights on—Hearst-owned Times Union. Remember, as Rex Smith once said (and we paraphrase), Hearst doesn’t really tell them what to do . . . only how much they have to contribute to the bottom line.

Best Columnist

Carl Strock

In August 2004, Strock was the first and only columnist in the region—and possibly the country—to cast a critical eye on the arrest of two Muslim men in Albany for allegedly laundering money to fund a terrorist attack. While much of the mainstream media was busy coming up with variations on the “Be Afraid, It Can Happen Here!” headline, Strock was dissecting the case against the two men and making some prescient (as we soon discovered) observations about the evidence against them. For instance, he theorized in an Aug. 12 column that a word found next to one of the men’s names on a piece of paper in a bombed-out Iraqi village might not mean “commander,” as prosecutors claimed, but possibly “teacher” or “leader.” A few days later, we discovered that the government’s translators had indeed made a mistake, and the man, an imam at a local mosque, was simply identified as “brother” in the document. His dead-on predictions about the case’s shakiness didn’t stop there, either. From sketchy accusations about the pair’s overseas connections to ambiguities about how far the government went in facilitating the alleged incident, Strock’s analysis heralded each subsequent erosion of the government’s case, and became one of the sole reminders that, in America, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

Best Daily Print Journalist

Michael P. Farrell

Times Union

That’s right, our pick for this category isn’t a writer, he’s a photographer whose deft balancing of the human touch with an arty edge makes his eye-catching pictures jump off the page and into readers’ hearts. Especially impressive have been Farrell’s pictures for an ongoing series about reading—in a delicious twist of irony, they tell the story visually, almost rendering the text unnecessary.

Best Blog (News)

Democracy in Albany

www.democracyinalbany.com

Despite all of the you-scratch-my-back attention heaped on certain blogs by local media (i.e., the Times Union’s oft-requited love for the schizophrenic Albany Eye blog), the author of DIA has managed to make his Internet soapbox into the most consistent and insightful forum on the Web for discussing the issues affecting the Capital Region. DIA and its legion of regular commenters succeed where their counterparts fail: welcoming debate on entries, encouraging the spread of information, casting a wide-reaching, critical eye on local media (including Metroland, of course) and generally providing a great online clearinghouse for all things regional and political.

Best Newsletter

Mansion News & Notes

It’s what a neighborhood newsletter ought to be. Mansion News & Notes, put out by a team of editors in the Mansion Neighborhood of Albany, includes notices of relevant meetings, announcements of store openings and apartments for rent, reports on neighborhood events, and even the occasional alert to watch out for a suspicious person. It comes out when there’s content, usually a couple times a week, so it’s timely without being overwhelming. The format is consistent and the information relevant. So if they occasionally snark about people who are curious about the etymology of their neighborhood’s name, who are we to complain?

Best Community Newspaper

Altamont Enterprise

Granted, they do get a little hysterical about the evil influence of the big city from time to time, but when it comes to covering the western reaches of Albany County, the Enterprise takes its job seriously and does the kind of in-the-trenches, dog-the-story-until-it’s-over community coverage that is the bedrock of truly local journalism. There’s a reason the Enterprise hasn’t ceded the title of “paper of record” to the big dailies.

Best Use of a Political Science Degree and a Laptop

O, SmAlbany!

Matt Glassman is hard at work trying to get his dissertation done for a poli-sci degree from Yale, but in the meantime (except for an intentional hiatus this summer, recently over) he keeps up an interesting and fun blog at smalbany.blog spot.com, which veers from centrist politics to restaurant reviews. But SmAlbany really shines when Glassman puts his social science smarts to work, for example, in his careful dissection on May 25 of the statistical methods in a Times Union article on disparities in hiring in Albany or laying out the theoretical ups and downs of a strong-mayor system as regards charter reform.

Best Reason To Watch Fox News

Cheese Ninja

www.newsbreakers.org/cninja.htm

The Syracuse-based media pranksters of Newsbreakers paid the Capital Region a visit this April, dispatching their lactose-savvy assassin to the site of a live FOX23 news broadcast in Saratoga Springs. During the segment, the black-pajama-clad Newsbreaker darted back and forth behind the station’s reporter, stopping only long enough to sling slices of individually wrapped justice at the camera. According to the Newsbreakers site, the ninja was simply returning the “processed cheese that has become a main tool of TV news.” Judging by the Fox crew’s angry reaction (near the end of the clip), the station didn’t think the stunt was very funny. Visit their Web site (www.newsbreak ers.org), and you can decide for yourself.