Matt Condie, known in many local radio circles as “Rascal,” is the new morning show host at KTGV 106.3 FM. In the process, he becomes the station’s first on-air talent for the so-called “old-school” music format, which is more or less an R&B hits station. Think heavy (really heavy) doses of Michael Jackson mixed with Prince, Whitney Houston and Earth, Wind and Fire.

“It’s already an established brand, so it’s a format we don’t have to change,” Condie said. “The format has held its own jockless, but at this point (management) wants to work on building a big station. It’s a perfect opportunity to grow the brand of the station.”

Condie is best known in this market for morning show stints on what is now Clear Channel owned modern hip-hop format KOHT 98.3 FM and the old Power 97.5. Condie hopes that original audience will make the transition with him to “The Groove.”

“It’s the same music and the same crowd who liked that music. It’s just growing up with them now,” Condie said. “The state of modern hip hop and pop is garbage, but this is classic. This is where hip hop and pop came from, and this is what we grew up listening to. I still have the best of the Gap Band, the Earth, Wind and Fire box set. It’s when music was fun.”

The “Rascal on the Radio” morning show debuts Nov. 10.

“They’ve been looking and looking for a fit at the station,” said Condie. “I’m Program Director/Music Director/Morning guy. My philosophy is this: it’s my belief to compete music wise in this world of iPods and downloads and satellite radio, it has to be smash hit, smash hit, smash hit, and uber-local. We all live here. This is the coolest place in the country because it’s subtlely influenced by hispanic culture, but it’s not overt. Everyone in this area loves funk music. That’s what our musical taste was when we grew up. (Management is) looking for someone to focus in on the station. It’s served its purpose as sort of a united front, and now they want to niche out and make The Groove its own entity. I know the music, and I love the idea they said they want to make this station something.”

Condie’s addition makes him the sixth locally produced music-based morning show in the market. It also marks the first time in many years a music-based radio station without a local morning presence added on-air talent to its roster.

• Tom & Ray Magliozzi

One of public radio's first really big stars, a graduate of MIT turned car mechanic, Tom Magliozzi of Car Talk died today of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old.

While Tom and his younger brother Ray stopped doing new episodes of their famous car repair show two years ago, best of episodes still air on KUAZ 89.1 on Saturdays at 10 a.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m.

From NPR:

After getting out of college, Tom Magliozzi went to work as an engineer. One day he had a kind of epiphany, he told graduates when he and Ray gave the 1999 commencement address at their alma mater.

He was on his way to work when he had a near-fatal accident with a tractor-trailer. He pulled off the road and decided to do something different with his life.

"I quit my job," he said. "I became a bum. I spent two years sitting in Harvard Square drinking coffee. I invented the concept of the do-it-yourself auto repair shop, and I met my lovely wife."

Well, he wasn't exactly a bum; he worked as a consultant and college professor, eventually getting a doctoral degree in marketing. And Tom and Ray Magliozzi did open that do-it-yourself repair shop in the early '70s. They called it Hackers Heaven. Later they opened a more traditional car repair shop called the Good News Garage.

They got into radio by accident when someone from the local public radio station, WBUR, was putting together a panel of car mechanics for a talk show.

"They called Ray, and Ray thought it was a dumb idea, so he said, 'I'll send my brother' and Tom thought, 'Great, I'll get out of breaking my knuckles for a couple of hours.' And he went over and he was the only one who showed up," Berman says.

Back in September we began sharing a series of posts from Narco News on their friend, the late journalist Gary Webb and the new movie about his career, released this month, "Kill the Messenger," starring Jeremy Renner.

Narco News founder Al Giordano, in his first essay about his friend and the movie, predicted that the big news outlets that attacked Webb and his ground-breaking work, would be back to defend themselves and bring Webb down once again:

“In the coming weeks we can expect more such panicked response to the Kill the Messenger movie from the same career apparatchiks that smeared Gary Webb to begin with, doubling down on their worn and rusted hatchets.

“Like Wile E. Coyote, they’ll hoist the piano over their heads one last time, and predictably the piano will fall back down upon them.”

And sure enough, in Giordano's latest, with Narco News writer and editor Bill Conroy, that attack came from Washington Post's Jeff Leen, assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's investigations unit. Why would Leen get in on the anti-Webb action?

According to his Oct. 17 essay in The Washington Post, he was there and of course remember all of it very differently than what was portrayed in the move:

I had a ringside seat to the Webb saga. As an investigative reporter covering the drug trade for the Miami Herald, also a Knight Ridder newspaper, I wrote about the explosion of cocaine in America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the role of Colombia’s Medellin Cartel in fueling it.

Beginning in 1985, journalists started pursuing tips about the CIA’s role in the drug trade. Was the agency allowing cocaine to flow into the United States as a means to fund its secret war supporting the contra rebels in Nicaragua? Many journalists, including me, chased that story from different angles, but the extraordinary proof was always lacking.

And, of course, lucky for us Giordano and Conroy see it differently:

Poor Jeff Leen had to report to work each day and seek some other path to the Hollywood stardom and millions he thought being a journalist would someday bring him. How many times he sent his resume to the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times while cursing his fate in Miami is a number between him and his god. In his desperate plea for their attention, according to a book by the late Gary Webb, he cooked up a fake idea in his Herald reporting: That Miami was the birthplace of the crack cocaine explosion in the United States. In Miami, a city that would like to be first in something, anything, even crack, they inhaled those fumes eagerly.

Then along came Gary Webb, over on the West Coast, with the documents that proved Jeff Leen’s entire journalistic gambit had been a fraud.

Why are we telling you about this Jeff Leen character? You’ve probably never heard of him or read any his work or, if you did, found it important or memorable, not even during his 17 years at the Washington Post. You might be able to name other Post writers and columnists, including people who’ve been there far less time than Leen. But for good reason, you’ve never heard of this guy.

A few days ago, Leen wrote an opinion column for the Post, a newspaper whose shameful behavior in 1996 is now topic of the major motion picture, “Kill the Messenger.” Two-time Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner portrays Leen’s old imaginary nemesis, Gary Webb, and convincingly depicts the latter’s reporting of the most important investigative news story of the 1990s, and the turmoil that engulfed Webb when the big three daily newspapers in Washington, New York and Los Angeles then ganged up to destroy Webb’s career.

Leen apparently burst a spleen when he saw “Kill the Messenger” on the silver screen. There was the late Gary Webb. Although he never made the “millions” Leen said back in 1997 that he aspired to win through journalism, Webb is suddenly occupying the heroic space in Hollywood’s star pantheon that Leen told us in 1997 was his dream to fill. And so Leen took his butthurt grievance to the Washington Post editorial pages last Friday.

“Gary Webb was no journalism hero despite what ‘Kill the Messenger’ says,” shouted the headline on Jeff Leen’s essay.

H/T to Latino Rebels for their reaction to Google's launch of .SOY, a web domain for Latinos.

I'm confused. I mean, since the reconquista already happened doesn't that mean that ALL web domains are Latino?

Well, yes and no.

From Latino Rebels:

The development of which I speak has to do with how Mountain View, California-based Google’s launch of .SOY, a web domain targeting the country’s Latinos, was supposed to herald a new day on the Latino web, with some “Hispanic marketing experts” waxing triumphant about our (finally) getting some respect from a company that has a less-than-triumphant record of hiring Latinos or black people.

And then the Latino and vegan web responded: Hey Google, “soy” (Spanish for “I am”) sounds more like a domain name for one of the tony vegan Mexican restaurants where Google and other Silicon Valley workers eat $15 tacos than it does a hub for online Latinos.

Far from being the Latino web sensation Google and its “experts” expected, .SOY provides fodder for the amateur comedian in us all, with Latinos and vegans joining forces, taking the “.SOY” domain and applying it to different adjectives like quépendejo.soy (how stupid I am), #soyhispandering or calling .SOY “The must-have domain for the lactose-intolerant.”

Twitter desmadre:

In the end, can't help but think of Cheech and Chong's "Mexican Americans," because, well yeah, Latinos kinda like lots of different things, even soy milk.

Want to get a preview of the winners from the 2014 Best of Tucson issue, hitting streets (late, please be patient) on Thursday?

I'll be on the Home Stretch with Cathy Rivers Wednesday night at 5 p.m. talking BOT, so if you're dying to know the winner for a specific category, shout it out in the comments here and I'll see if I can shout it out on air tonight.

Paul Berry, the Executive Director, News and Engagement at the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader (and, full disclosure, a guy I'm Facebook friends with) wrote an editorial in his paper's Sunday edition about why they're dumping mugshot galleries:

I'd been thinking lately about the mug shots and our role as the community newspaper. As I've said countless times since getting here, our success hinges on our ability to produce quality journalism that impacts our community.

Good journalism seeks to bring clarity to confusion, helps us ask informed questions and provides us with the information we need to make informed decisions for our families, businesses and communities.

We've been struggling with how these galleries fit into our approach. While they serve as a record of arrests in our area, they raise significant questions. Was the arrest justified? Were formal charges filed? What is the condition of the person arrested?

Without proper context, the galleries serve as little more than a place for people to gawk at those who have been arrested. Many of those who are arrested need our community's help, not our ridicule.

[...]

We'll continue to report on the serious crimes against people in our community, as you've come to expect from us. And we won't shy away from holding people accountable for their actions, including publishing their photos.

But for now, mug shots are a machine we won't be turning back on again.

I've made this point before, and while I know the clickbait value of these slideshows (LOL PERSON AT THEIR WORST MOMENT LOL), it seems like newspapers, as Paul wrote, as agents charged with bringing "clarity to confusion" should probably avoid being in the business of shaming people who are still innocent until proven guilty.

Do these photos help you live a better life? No. Help you be a better member of your community? Not really. Inform you in any manner whatsoever unless you just happen to recognize someone in the photostream (and even then, you're only ahead in knowing that they were arrested, not if the case was resolved somehow)? Nope.

In fact, many of the Star's mugshots are from Maricopa County, which sort of invalidates the idea that posting these photos is some sort of community service. Even the wire-service-supplied weekly slideshow of NFL cheerleaders, which has zero news value and should be somewhat embarrassing for a theoretically serious newspaper to host, at least doesn't infringe on our basic values of justice.

Now that the paywall is up (more or less) for the Star, shouldn't they be able to dump the most absurd traffic-baiting features? First up, learning from the example of the Springfield News-Leader, should be the mugshots.

Narco News, which has been loyally persistent in getting word out about their friend Gary Webb, his work and the upcoming movie starring Jeremy Renner as Webb, Kill the Messenger, has a new story by Bill Conroy out today, which allows his family to explain what happened and how they feel about the movie.

It's another great read on Webb from Narco News that's worth your time. Also seems worth noting, too, is that Nick Schou's book the movie is based on, "Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb," is on Audible and read by Chuck Bowden.

Now that's got to be a damn gift right there, right?

From Conroy:

Also important to the family is the fact hat the people involved in making the movie are invested in the project, and care about the events portrayed in the movie. It wasn’t just a money grab for them, the family says.

“When we were at the filming in Atlanta, they were talking about how the actors and actresses, and everyone involved in the movie, were doing it because they care about it, not just for the money,” Christine says. “Someone said we’re basically calling up actors and actresses on family vacation asking them if they want to come to hot, humid Atlanta for $8 to film a movie.”

“They’re not getting paid much,” Sue adds, “and Oliver Platt cancelled his vacation to do the part because he really wanted to play [Mercury News Executive Editor] Jerry Ceppos so much.”

She says it was clear to her that Jeremy Renner also has put his heart into the project. “He spent so much time with us in Atlanta [where the film was shot], had lunch with us, warmed up to us, gave us hugs, and he was so excited about it, and moved by it too,” she says.

Sue is particularly impressed with another aspect of Kill the Messenger: The fact that it gets the story right.

“We’re just so happy Gary’s going to be vindicated, and he is in the movie. The core of the movie is right. The truth is there.

“I think Gary would have liked it. I think he would have really liked the movie, and been so excited about it,” Sue adds.

“It just feels right,” Ian says. “It makes everybody who was bad look bad, and everyone who was good look good. It just serves everyone a little bit of justice.”

Cuddlr: because sometimes you just want a cuddle. from Charlie Williams on Vimeo.

I guess when you are in need of human interaction, it takes more than the produce section of Fry's to make the world feel like a better place. And for those without dogs or unnaturally affectionate cats ... well, maybe this makes sense, this Cuddlr phone app that matches folks who aren't looking for a hook-up or the love of their life.

It's just for a quick cuddle and run.

This is going to start an entire new conversation on the manners involved with cuddling—make sure the sweater you're wearing that day isn't synthetic, wear some deodorant and make sure there's a nice thank you before you depart.

Who knows? This is how we solve climate change and world peace? Cuddle, people. Cuddle.

H/T The Independent:

According to the Daily Mirror newspaper, Cuddlr's creator, Charlie Williams, said: “On Cuddlr, you get together straight away, have a little cuddle, and then part ways.

“If you want to hang out again, you can exchange information then and there - but you already know what kind of cuddles they give.

“It is possible to report someone who cuddles inappropriately, and we encourage first-time pairs to do their cuddling in a public place.

“Users can give information about their cuddling preferences such as if they favour being the little or big spoon.”

A rating system is used to assess cuddles as “awesome”, “good”, “ok” or “inappropriate”.

The free app stresses: “Unlike some other apps, Cuddlr is strictly about PG-rated experiences. Keep the cuddle a cuddle!

“At times you may want to ask someone about having a coffee or learning to knit. Wait until the end of the cuddle, then ask politely.”

Congratulations, Arizona Public Media, on the recent announcement that our local PBS station received a record 23 Emmy nominations—the most in the nonprofit category's history from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Rocky Mountain chapter. And big congratulatory hugs to former Tucson Weekly intern Mariana Dale, who worked on an Emmy-nominated segment.

From AZPM's announcement:

"I am extremely pleased to report that AZPM staff were again recognized with more Emmy nominations than any other station in Tucson and more than any other public broadcaster in the region," AZPM General Manager Jack Gibson said. "With 23 program/story nominations, and with 36 staff members nominated, this is the best performance in AZPM's history."

The nominees include three current or former UA students. On average, AZPM employs 16 UA students on its production team, where they learn hands-on about all facets of television production.

Mariana Dale, who graduated from the UA in May with a bachelor's degree in journalism, worked on the Emmy-nominated segment "Tucson Jazz Institute Ellington Band" while a student employee at AZPM.

"It's always great to be recognized for the work you do, especially when you know you put a lot of hard work into something," Dale said.

"Working at AZPM was immensely helpful," added Dale, who now works as a reporter at The Arizona Republic. "Their storytellers are just wonderful. They really push you to think about how you can produce for radio, TV and print. It stretches you to figure out different ways how to tell a story."

Arizona Public Media is a part of the UA's University Relations division.

University Relations, Communications, also is nominated for an Emmy in the Arts/Entertainment — News Single Story/Series/Feature category for the UANews video "Artists Draw from Life, Nature, Science on Tumamoc Hill," produced by Carina Johnson.

Each year, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognizes outstanding work in 90 television, production and creative communications categories. The winners will be announced at the Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards on Oct. 18 in Scottsdale.

A Facebook video posted by Daniel Thews on Saturday, Sept. 13 (since removed or with changed privacy settings) has been shared more than 850 times from Thews's open page, most likely because it allegedly shows two Tucson Police Department officers tackle and cuff two autistic boys or young men to the ground in the Peter Piper Pizza parking lot off Broadway Boulevard across the street from Park Place Mall.

We called Sgt. Chris Widmer, TPD public information officer, who told us he and others in his department had just seen the video and had no comment until they understood the context of what was taking place. We've filed a public records request, and Widmer said he's get back to us when they had additional information on exactly what took place.

While in the autism community, it is understood that TPD officers have taken a training on how to work with autistic children—many kids on the spectrum, high or low, have difficulty in public and sometimes run off. Having a police force that knows how to work with kids on the spectrum has always been a concern to parents and caretakers of autistic children to make sure their safety is understood and cared for.

We're waiting to hear back from Thews to better understand what he saw and why he was compelled to videotape what took place. But here's what he said on his thread: