May issue of Phoenix magazine
This is good news. Heat City has lost a little steam over the past couple weeks while I have been hard at work on some freelance projects. This means I make a little more money and you get to read my work in more publications.
This month, for example, you can pick up the new issue of Phoenix magazine to find three pieces I wrote. The first is on the new $340 million criminal court tower being built in downtown Phoenix (written prior to the announcement that the Maricopa County sheriff’s and attorney’s offices were conducting a criminal investigation into the project.) A second story is about the many stalled high-rise projects in downtown Tempe — and why some local business owners are happy about it. The third is about the locally-crafted online comic strip, Monster Commute, which is a good read five days a week. None of the stories are online, so you have to buy the magazine or find it at your nearest library if you want to read them. But I’m looking into the possibility of reprinting some of the articles here.
In another arena, I also recently contributed to a new project called MediaCritic. Based out of Arizona State University and launched by Dan Gillmor and some other talented digital journalists, it’s the seed of a project devoted to media criticism that its founders hope will grow into a nationwide conversation on the subject. Currently, it’s focused on Phoenix critics exclusively, but it is expected to eventually branch out to other cities.
I’m all for it and was happy to offer a few exclusive posts to the site. In the first one, I wrote about my experiences covering Phoenix-area media since January. It’s based on the feedback that many of my readers have given me through email and Twitter to stories I’ve posted about local media. The response has been surprising and well worth writing about.
MediaCritic’s official launch was supposed to still be a little while out, but one of of my fellow contributors, ASU professor Tim McGuire, mistakenly outed the project on his own blog earlier today, and the post almost immediately got picked up by a national industry website. So, ready or not, the site is up and running now, even before it has migrated to a legitimate domain name. Look for that transition and some more changes in the weeks to come, and hopefully we’ll see some big things with this project in the future.
Finally, despite my recent absence, Heat City is still getting some traction nationwide. It was recently included in a guide to local watchdog news sites by PBS MediaShift, which wrote more about this site and the Arizona Guardian earlier this year. I’m grateful to be included, and can assure everyone I’ll be adding more watchdog stories here next week — just as soon as I’m off deadline.