We’re starting a new feature this week where we put two or more similar businesses, places, restaurants or things into a sealed cage of pain, suffering and death. Ultimately only one contestant lives and it’s up to you to figure out who that is.
This week, we present C-Ville Weekly vs The Hook. In one corner we have an overzealous beast of envy who eats livers for breakfast and huffs more glue than the internet. And in the other, we have a rabid junkyard attack dog whose teeth have been replaced by poisoned razor blades. Who wins? You decide!
Which Charlottesville Rag Wins?
Related posts:
- The C-Ville Weekly Makes Mountains Out of Molehills
- Charlottesville Deathmatch Round 3: Battle of the Sandwich Places
- Charlottesville Deathmatch Round 2: Battle of the Local Radio Stations
I am abstaining from voting until The Echo is given its fair chance at winning.
Gawd, the amount of blog chatter wasted on this topic over the years…
Still, The Hook wins for presenting actual news on a weekly basis, even as their self-righteousness grows increasingly obnoxious.
The Hook wins for the coverage of the water plan and other stories it has broken.
I like C-Ville but they just seem to play it too safe.
I like the way The Hook is stapled better. Win!
Cville Weekly has more pointless articles and stupid gossipy stuff, so it gets the nod from me. If I want real news, I sure as hell ain’t turning to either of these.
Cville’s political bias is perhaps more glaring, too. So if my crazy, arch-conservative (sry for redundancy) self want to know what the other side is doing, it gets my attn.
i find the Hook and Cville staples are a pain when you are trying to build a fire.
The Cavalier Daily is an EXCELLENT cover-to-cover read.
I like how both of them have so little advertising. Umm, not so much.
let’s do the math ok, ok!
c-ville: editors blow
art staff very good
the hook: editors very good
art staff kick butt
so, ummm, gonna have to vote for hookers
c-ville has toby. hook has lilith.
/loves toby.
hook–> crossword always easier to find
hook employs supermodel.
cville employs…. ummmm….
I think this idea is not productive. Like the hook, it focuses on conflict, instead of civic responsability and the community. Really, what do we want our press to say about our society? That we’re snarky and would rrather focus on the conflict instead of the community at large?
Can’t we all just get along?
i think we should spread the wealth around.
and i think that we should build a snarkosphere.
@12 gee, Leo, you’d think you had some sort of anti-snark meter or something going on. civic responsibility? how long have you been following this blog? What I want from “our press” (like it’s really ours or something), is to provide facts. What I want from cvillain is complete and utter snarkiness and outing of facts/rumors/conjectures. And no, we can’t “all just get along”, we’re a flippin’ democracy, and we’s all got our own opinions…i, for one, refuse to ‘march in step’ with the conservatives/republicans, etc, etc, ad nauseum. I, as a totally red blooded american, reserve my right to my opinion, party and vote.
@13
“i think that we should spread the wealth around”…
i smell a socialist.
.
/snark
and i think that we should build a snarkosphere
Is that like a Bio-dome?
@16 ahahaha BIodome: Dennis Hopper Blue Velvet: Oo I’m slutty, ooo I’m slutty!”
The Hook takes a huge overnight lead- was the city of Charlottesville in charge of counting votes?
@12 – we are a melting pot of opinion. if you want to write an article and change the direction of our blog, be my guest!
Every poll should have an “add your own answer” option, lest it become tedious.
anyone else notice that firefox doesnt show the ‘vote’ button? i had to use IE
I saw C-ville drive by and on their back windshield was a sticker of Calvin peeing on the Hook. True story.
Donk! I got your FB message in my gmail but I can’t get into my FB. I think the IT guys are fucking with me. Just gmail me at my name + middle initial+ last name, mmkay?
@24, if any exchange happens, you owe cvillain 10%
Exchange? What do you mean?
Thor wants the cut for being your pimp.
Pssssht, I don’t need no pimp.
That’s what they all say, and then one day some guy tries to not pay you. You try to fight him, but he bitch slaps you, and it’s at that moment where you wish you had a pimp to come bust his kneecaps.
Getting back on topic for a minute …. I don’t really get it. C-VILLE covers a wide, and much broader, array of news about Charlottesville, UVA, government, development, etc. So why is it that people say/feel that the HOOK covers more “actual news” on a weekly basis? How are you defining news?
I think the Hook has better covers and general layout, but I like C-Ville’s crossword better, and I like the rant… it may be pointless, but it’s very entertaining. I also really like C-Ville’s Abode, so maybe in the end C-ville wins…
I’m supposed to be getting paid? Shit! I’ve been doing it all wrong.
For me, it’s all about the music coverage and C-Ville takes the cake hands down.
Vijith Assar is close to being one of the biggest tools of a music writer I’ve tried to read and Lindsay Barnes doesn’t follow too far behind.
Brendan over at the C-Ville might have a tendency to skew overly optimistic and positive, but that’s not a bad thing and he’s passionate about music and the local scene.
John Ruscher – bless his departed soul, was one of the best music writers eVaH!11! His legacy will give C-Ville music cred for at least another year or two.
Bottom line, both rags make perfect toilet reading – and if the economy continues to slide, they’ll both make equally useful toilet paper.
@34, have you read Shaun’s stuff on cvilleMUSE?
@31: For me it all comes down to comprehensiveness. The Hook is more concerned with having long comprehensive articles that are relevant to the community. Off the top of my head the cover stories coming from the Hook that I can think of are about local recycling, local watershed and land use issues, local murders and mysteries, local elections…you get the idea. They can come across a little arrogant, but in the end, they’re taking the news of a small town very seriously which is a standard that I think Charlottesville should not only expect, but applaud. Ultimately, the very best thing that could have happened to either paper is having a healthy dose of competition to keep them on their toes. My vote? The Hook wins by a landslide.
Also, I have to go on record spreading some Vijith love–the kid’s a genius and a great writer.
@36 I get your point there – and especially agree about the positive impact of competition – but I remain confused. You can certainly take your list of coverage of “news of a small town” and apply the same to the coverage provided by C-ville. In fact, the C-ville did a full cover on the local Periello vs Goode race long before the Hook even touched that subject. As well, the C-ville has covered drugs, gangs, issues of development and the challenging real estate market. I can easily see the two getting equal accolades for news coverage, but — still trying to delve deeper — why the impression that the Hook wins by a “landslide?” Anyone else?
Wallace, the Hook followed around Periello on election day and had a much more personal article then the Cville weekly.This week’s Cville cover was who gave all the money for local elections. The Hook smelled the upset and took a chance; the Cville gave you what you had already read in the Progress. They do come out on different days and that makes their coverage different as well.
Uh, well, maybe you should look at this story that Cville ran in Oct about Tom P if you want to talk about sniffing out a story. Seems like they spent a lot of time with him back in the summer when he was a longshot. http://tinyurl.com/5dpvya
another thing on Tom and Cville — they had a blog up all election day and the next day when the race was still undecided that gave regular updates. you guys know about blogs, right?
i like very much @36. it hadn’t occured to me, having watched both papers from each their founding, to take either of them as serious journals. Looking now from that perspective, the Hook is unquestionably what you describe it to be, and superlatively. The Cville is a sprawling and often entertaining read, even if it is Village Voice by way of The Daily Worker.
Neither, however, is what i want. The original Cville Weekly is what i want–run by the same two Hampster-City firebrands—it was excrutiatingly local, insider, almost entirely focused on the downtown mall as the principal public space, it was full of snark and gags and a playful arrogance, and was fearlessly offending. It was Spy Magazine, it was The Declaration on steroids. It was then a paper people would read ALOUD in bars. Editors grow up, as I suppose the town insisted they must.
When Hook broke off, all the criers doomed it to fail by the idea that the town couldn’t support two tabloids. Obviously false then as now. WE NEED A THIRD.
I love Cvillain because it’s as close as can be got today to what The Cville Review was. I know we are the web-satan burning the paper-press, but gee it’d be nice to have a funny and snarky and slightly more insider-personal paper in this town again, something to flip through at a cafe and not read with horn-rims while smoking a pipe, something without ten-page award-winning ‘profiles’, and with more journalistic irresponsibility and more insulting dash… a paper that would spoof itself from time to time, a paper that would tick-off Halsey Minor just for the merry hell of it, a paper that would run a Floozy Quote-of-The-Week, etc etc etc. But christ, how many dozens of downtown start-up mags and zines i have piled on my shelf…
@20 Amen, brother! Subject that causes me to rant: POLLS WITH NO ADD-YOUR-OWN OPTION! WHY? WHY? WHY? B-Yo said it better, but he’s cool that way.
They are both incestuous self-adoring pseudo-intellectual rags. Much like our safe little bubble of a town that sits in the center of the universe.