City Pages “Best of” issue: Media notables

After a technical glitch kept City Pages’ “Best of” edition offline awhile, one of its winners, the blog Mediation, offered a quick tweet: “I think it takes guts to not have your biggest issue of the year online on time and then go after vita.mn instead. Well done, CP.” Now that it’s up — and Mediation’s honor still a part of it — here’s an utterly incomplete list of the media standouts:

Best columnist: Nick Coleman. I agree: This longtime Stribber “found a cause big enough to support his righteous outrage” in the 35-W collapse. Can’t wait to see the ipecac-like effect this has on rightwing bloggers, who already rack up thousand-word screeds on their dislike of Coleman.

Best weatherperson: “Filthy rich” Paul Douglas

Best (non-TV) weather person: In a wide, wide field of possiblities, the nod goes to Jimmy “Dutch” Gaines of Dude Weather for his “hilarious skewering of the cult of the ‘meteorologist.’”

Best citizen-based media outlet: Duh. The UpTake.

Best local website: MNspeak. I like it too, for the info and odd assortment of personalities, but shouldn’t technology play a role in a best-site honor? As its creator Rex Sorgatz told me last year, MNspeak hasn’t implemented any site updates since he sold it in 2006; by outward appearances, at least, that still seems to be the case. (A biased aside: for sheer technical weirdness, my vote would go to my old employer, the Walker Art Center, for its new site for teens.)

Best local blog: Mediation. I agree on the choice, but City Pages fails to mention the entire point of Taylor Carik’s site — media — and seems clueless about his Tumblr template: “[H]is stripped-down site simply offers links to other web pages he finds interesting, with perhaps a sentence or two of comment, as if he’s doing this simply as a public service.”