• Check out the snappy new logo.

In what's seemingly a promotion for the world of alt-rock in Tucson, Lotus-owned radio stations KFMA and La Caliente (the biggest Spanish language in the market) are switching frequencies, with KFMA moving to 102.1 and La Caliente taking over the dual spots of the dial of 92.1 and 101.3 on March 21 at midnight. For what it's worth, 102.1 is the more powerful tower, broadcasting at twice the wattage of 92.1, so if you've had issues picking up my Friday at 8:05 a.m. appearance on the Fook morning show, this has to be good news.

The $13.5 million campaign for the Save Old Main fund to support the renovation project continues. The UA employee site, Lo Que Pasa, just released this video along with this campaign/renovation update:

Before it sprawled across 387 acres, the UA was housed in just one building: Old Main.

While the University has grown in size over the decades, Old Main has remained standing, becoming a beloved campus icon and a reminder of how far the University has come.

Last summer, Old Main was emptied so a delicate process of renovating and restoring the 122-year-old brick building could move forward. On Oct. 1, the University launched a $13.5 million Save Old Main fundraising campaign to support the project. (Read more about the restoration efforts in this article.)

Renovations are scheduled to be completed this summer, with the building ready for occupancy in time for the fall semester.

To UA students and employees, Old Main is much more than just another campus building; it's the heart of the University. Many employees have fond memories of Old Main from when they were students or had offices in the building. In this video, they share some of those memories and talk about Old Main's significance to UA history.

Updates on the Save Old Main campaign are available on Twitter, at @SaveOldMain, and users can share their own memories by using the hashtag #saveoldmain.

Gannett Publishing, which clears more than $6 million annually as part of its partnership with Lee Enterprises and the Arizona Daily Star, decided today that its salary overhead — one full-time employee — was too much of a burden to its bottom line.

It announced today that it has shut down the community blog site TucsonCitizen.com, effective immediately. The site will become an archive-only site.

“We are pleased to continue tucsoncitizen.com as an important community resource for Tucsonans who want to research history and the traditions of their city,” wrote Kate Marymount, Gannett’s senior vice president/news for the community publishing division, on a note posted on the site.

Marymount did not respond to repeated efforts for comment about the status of the site during the months since a leadership transition occurred. Mark B. Evans, the editor of Wick-owned Inside Tucson Business, left his position as the administrator of tucsoncitizen.com in September. Since that point, Anthony Gimino, the sole paid casualty in today’s decision, ran into repeated roadblocks in an effort to revamp the concept.

“It’s certainly what I feared when Mark left. Gannett’s energies would be directed toward finding a way to shut it down, “ Gimino said. “I presented an alternative for the site, which was to make it a two-person sports-specific site with two full-time people and a talented group of bloggers including Andy Morales and Scott Terrell. Apparently, that didn’t gain enough traction for them. That idea was even endorsed by Mark, who thought it would be a good direction for the site.”

In recent years, tucsoncitizen.com had been plagued by increasingly frustrating technical issues. Behind the scenes, it wasn’t a priority for a web development staff focused more on devoting its efforts to the functionality of the Arizona Daily Star website, azstarnet.com. And Gannett made no effort to pursue improvements through other avenues.
“There were long-term technical issues,” Gimino said. “Mark (Evans) had been banging that drum as early as a couple summers ago. It wasn’t something at the top of Gannett’s top priority list to get a redesign of the site or get a fix for our more recent technical glitches. We were definitely at the bottom of their totem pole.”

Despite the frustrations, tucsoncitizen.com had some standout contributors. In addition to Gimino, whose coverage of UA sports has been the best in the city for years — Evans calls Gimino one of the finest sports journalists in the Gannett chain — the site also benefited from the efforts of Andy Morales, the city’s top prep reporter. Gimino singled out the efforts of other contributors, including pet blogger Karyn Zoldan and current events blogger Carolyn Classen.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t offer my appreciation for their work, for some of them for five years being unpaid by the site,” said Gimino. “Some of their work was remarkable.”

Said Gimino: “I’ve been laid off by Gannett before. That’s not new. It was also a great job with autonomy. I could cover the university as I chose. That’s certainly the fun part of it, covering this football and basketball team. I’ve still managed to write about sports, write about the university, so I hope there are some opportunities in that regard. I hope to continue writing, or talking, about Arizona athletics.”

I'm all for satire and Sochi-shaming, and even re-posting those bare-chested horse-riding Putin photos as often as possible. But this new video making the rounds on the internets is satire magic.

I foresee a special Winter Olympic opening held at the Loft with a sing-along. A girl can dream.

KEVT AM 1210 has dabbled with a number of Spanish language formats since it turned on the transmitter in 1985. That changed today (Friday, Jan. 31). Talk show host Jim Parisi, who over the summer told the Tucson Weekly he was pursuing efforts to operate a station, has made good on that promise.

Parisi is launching Power Talk 1210 beginning Feb. 17.

“We looked at three stations, two of them very seriously,” said Parisi. “We were talking with money folks for awhile, but it was tough to get it going and get everybody to shake hands and get it done. A lot of people don’t get the business done because they’ll haggle over what I think is a relatively small amount of money in the big picture, so I think the reason we finally got something done is maybe we’ll pay a couple grand more than the last group that tried to get it done. I would rather drive the car than not, and we’re in a situation where we can have some success.”

Parisi will act as station manager as part of a local marketing agreement. The 10,000-watt signal, which reduces power to 1,000 watts at night, will remain under the ownership of Armando Zamora, but Parisi has total control over content.

“I’ve come to a point that the only way to be happy is what I believe in. I’m not doing anything that doesn’t reflect how I truly feel, so it will be the most genuine station I can be a part of,” said Parisi, who announced the deal in front of a group of faithful supporters at a local Pizza Hut. “I’m going to have to thicken my skin and not worry if people say I don’t yell enough or if I’m open minded to something on the left. I’m at peace with that. I’m a strong, hard-hitting journalist when need be, but if I want to do comedy for 15 minutes, I’m doing it. There’s a market for that. I think the average person is deeper than just politics. I don’t want it to be just politics.”

It won’t be. KEVT will run mostly local newstalk programming weekdays from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., but then play Fox Sports syndicated programming overnight and for the most part on weekends.

“That’s one of the reason I went with sports as opposed to unknown national hosts overnight that only people who are political addicts would enjoy. I want to have all kinds of topics,” Parisi said. “The only rule I’m going to have is be open minded. I don’t care if you lean left or right. Be open minded. Listen to the callers, engage with them, you can be funny and give them grief, but be open minded. Some may see it as weakness. I see it as legit. If you really like the far right mandate right down the line, you’ll find fault in what we do. But we’ll have more women listening, we’ll have more well-rounded people listening. I’m the only political reporter out of all these (local talk show hosts) on the air, but I’m just not a guy who thinks and talks politics his whole life. That’s just a waste of people’s time. You don’t have to fight your fight every single second. If someone is some kind of activist, I respect what you’re doing but you don’t define yourself by it.”

Parisi will host his show weekdays from 7 to 10 a.m. The rest of the schedule has yet to be solidified, but he’s working on final details on a local afternoon host and expects to nail down the specifics on a lead-in program from 5 to 7 a.m. in the next few days. In the short term, a syndicated political talk show will likely hold down the fort mid-days.

“We should have more local programming than most anyone in town,” Parisi said. “We want to be as local, but as budget conscious as we can so that we don’t go away.”

And always with a focus on other perspectives.

“Our catch phrase is the power to think for yourself,” said Parisi. “I like coming in without taking over for something that talk radio listeners were already listening to. We’re bringing an alternative in.”

"I have nothing to gain here. This has been disruptive of my life, and I've taken a number of personal risks. ... I have not gained anything except knowing that I came forward and did what I felt that I had an obligation to do. That was to tell the truth," Anita Hill, October 1991

So strange to think there are now generations who don't know the name Anita Hill or understand her importance in history, which makes the documentary Anita: Speaking Truth to Power so important.

The film debuts in theaters March 21. From the filmmakers:

An entire country watched transfixed as a poised, beautiful African-American woman in a blue dress sat before a Senate committee of 14 white men and with a clear, unwavering voice recounted the repeated acts of sexual harassment she had endured while working with U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. That October day in 1991 Anita Hill, a bookish law professor from Oklahoma, was thrust onto the world stage and instantly became a celebrated, hated, venerated, and divisive figure.

Anita Hill’s graphic testimony was a turning point for gender equality in the U.S. and ignited a political firestorm about sexual misconduct and power in the workplace that resonates still today. She has become an American icon, empowering millions of women and men around the world to stand up for equality and justice.

Against a backdrop of sex, politics, and race, ANITA reveals the intimate story of a woman who spoke truth to power. Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Freida Mock, the film is both a celebration of Anita Hill’s legacy and a rare glimpse into her private life with friends and family, many of whom were by her side that fateful day 22 years ago. Anita Hill courageously speaks openly and intimately for the first time about her experiences that led her to testify before the Senate and the obstacles she faced in simply telling the truth. She also candidly discusses what happened to her life and work in the 22 years since.

• Photo courtesy of shutterstock.com
• Williamsburg is a neighborhood in the borough of Brooklyn, bordering Greenpoint, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and the East River.

We have been saying this for years, but now it's on Gawker so it must be true.

Gawker conducted a survey with its readers to find the world's hippest, richest, creative, youngest, poorest and coolest neighborhoods that are comparable to Williamsburg which is commonly referred to as Bushwick and Little Puerto Rico. Surprisingly, Tucson's Fourth Avenue and Lost Barrio were nominated, by their readers, not ours, as some of the "hippest" spots in America. Do you agree with this?

The Phoenix New Times shared the 33rd annual Governor's Arts Awards nominees last week. Seventeen Tucson artist and organizations were among the 84 worthy Arizona nominees.

Here's the list of Tucson nominees:

Artist:
Daniel Buckley
Simon Kregar
Luis Mena
Joseph Rodgers

Arts in Education - Individual:
Dr. Suzette Battan
Adrienne Magee
Morgan Wells

Arizona schools want the legislature to add over $300 million to K-12 funding in next year's budget. Not much chance that's gonna happen. Brewer is calling for a lower number, $70 million, which makes her a big spender compared to her Republican counterparts in the legislature. Both of those are serious chunks of change. Brewer’s $70 million figure actually sounds moderately generous, and the $300 million request might sound a little greedy. But neither number makes much sense until we know how much difference it makes in the grand education funding scheme of things.

To understand what's going on, here are the two numbers you need to start with. About a million students attend Arizona’s K-12 public schools — that's district and charter schools combined — and the school year is 180 days long. So when you add a million dollars to the education budget, you’re adding a dollar per student per year, or a half a penny per student per day. A million dollars doesn’t go very far when it’s spread over all our public schools.

Some Arizona State University fraternity students posted horrendously offensive photos of themselves dressed in basketball jerseys, bandanas, drinking out of watermelons and throwing gang signs in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr., Day. This is almost as bad as the Naked ASU Girl. The Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity members posted the photos on Instagram and hash tagged the images "#mlkparty" and "blackoutformlk." Various media outlets scooped the story and it went viral overnight.

• Photo posted on Instagram

• Photo posted on Instagram