Long having been hailed for their originality as musicians, it comes as a bit of a surprise to some to find Dave Matthews Band borrowing so liberally when it comes to the Internet. As was brought to the Hook’s attention this week, the band’s website features a “Charlottesville” page listing local bands with pithy, often witty descriptions of each act. For example the author calls the Naked Puritans “Punk, minus the disconnect,” and describes American Dumpster as, “Junk rock (That’s not derogatory).”

Well, we here at the Hook know that kind of snappy syntax can only belong to Vijith Assar, our music editor. Sure enough, the vast majority of DMB’s “Charlottesville” page has already appeared under Assar’s byline in our Annual Manual.

“It looks like it was pulled verbatim from Vijith’s clever rundown of the local scene,” says Hook editor/publisher Hawes Spencer. “I guess the famous DMB taping policy is to be construed rather broadly.”

Officials from DMB’s Red Light Management had not returned a call for comment by the time of this post.

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“We’ll treat this like Vegas– what happens here, stays here,” said WINA program director Jay James last night at the Glenmore Country Club. Yeah, right. Like a bunch of advertising folk are going to keep their winnings a secret.

The event was the 2007 Emma Awards for Excellence in Marketing, and James was the host for the annual ceremony that drew Central Virginia chapter members of the American Marketing Association. “I can be impartial,” said James. “There is no radio category.”

Payne, Ross & Associates took home the overall marketing award for its Kl�ckner Pentaplast campaign, as well as best logo/graphic for Collins Engineering and best print advertising for Monticello. Susan Payne, left, and Lisa Ross clutch their coveted Emmas. (more)

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Going up: WNRN’s new antenna rises to the occasion via the crane on the right.
PHOTO BY JON HALL

Regular listeners to WNRN may have noticed over the past month that the modern rock station wasn’t coming in loud and clear. High winds April 16 blew the antenna off its Carter Mountain tower.

General manager Mike Friend could tell right away something had happened. “The top of the tower looked like there wasn’t an antenna there,” he says. “Fortunately we have a back-up antenna, but it’s kind of sucky.”

And Friend doesn’t even want to think about what kind of blast blew off a 30-pound antenna with two braces and dropped it 80 feet away. “That puppy just took on off,” understates Friend. (more)

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For three years now, ever since Frommer’s ranked Charlottesville the #1 place to live in America, the City has sported the slogan: City of Charlottesville: The Best Place to Live in America.”

However, it what might qualify as a “jump the shark” moment, Charlottesville has fallen in the rankings, to #17 according to the latest edition of Frommer’s, and the city has decided to retire that bold slogan for a more timid (and some might say clunky) one: “A Great Place to Live for All of Our Citizens.”

However, according to City spokesperson Ric Barrick, it wasn’t entirely a reaction to the new ranking.

“We knew we would have to change it eventually,” says Barrick.

Barrick says the new slogan is part of the strategic “vision statement” adopted by City Council earlier this month, and was conceived during a weekend retreat and “brainstorming session” sponsored by a UVA professor at Wintergreen Resort in February.

“We knew the rankings were coming up,” says Barrick, ” but even if we’d been chosen number one again, we would have changed it.”

So what do YOU think of the new slogan?

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First, she was expected to step into the shoes of Dan Rather and single-handedly stem the slide in evening news ratings. Now, in the wake of a backlash over her interview with presidential nominee John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, a story claims Katie Couric has enemies in her own newsroom. Are pundits piling on?

“The atmosphere around Couric has turned poisonous” says the National Journal. “For a while, as her ratings surfed the bottom, she enjoyed some free-floating sympathy. But now the tone has shifted into the kind of popular animus normally reserved for corrupt public officials.”

It’s a Fox News column that reports that some of Couric’s bad PR is coming from CBS insiders, and suspects one major source is veteran journalist and temporary Rather replacement Bob Schieffer, unhappy with his dwindling airtime on CBS Evening News.

A CBS news blog called Couric & Co. responded to Couric criticism after the Edwards interview. However, it has yet to address any rumors of tension in the newsroom.

The UVA alumna, typically praised for her compassionate interview style (most recently on display at Virginia Tech), was publicly criticized for “grilling” the Edwardses in late March.

Ironically, Couric became a spokeswoman for cancer awareness when her husband died of cancer in 1998. Three years later, her sister and former Charlottesville Senator Emily Couric died from cancer, inspiring the newswoman to help fund UVA’s planned Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center.

A tidal wave of criticism surfaced online after the Couric-Edwards interview, with websites like the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post among others jumping on the bandwagon.

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Embattled NBC29 anchor– er, make that former anchor– Kristina Cruise suffers the latest slight in her fall from grace for talking to the Hook– although sources familiar with Channel 29 say station management had long intended to replace her on the news at noon and 5pm to make way for new anchor Sharon Gregory.

As recently as April 19, Cruise still greeted viewers on the banner along with fellow anchors Mark O’Brien, Laura French, Shane Edinger, Steve Rappaport, and Crystal Cameron.

Today, however, it’s Gregory who is firmly lodged in the middle of the NBC29 talking heads. Cruise reportedly was suspended four days and demoted to reporter after being sent home April 9.

When contacted by the Hook last week to see how she fared after being unceremoniously demoted, Cruise said she’d ask station management if she could talk to us. Not surprisingly, that was the last we heard.

So far, her biography still identifies her as an anchor. Gregory comes from another Waterman Broadcasting station, ABC7 in Florida.
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