Content
The Straight carries feature articles, ranging from social topics, such as drug use, to in-depth looks at cultural newsmakers like the writer Salman Rushdie. Writer Charlie Smith has a record of covering women's movement issues as well. There are also many advertiser-related articles and listings on lifestyle and entertainment,commenting on restaurants, new wines, new gadgets, designer clothes, and the latest in music, theatre and movies. Rounding out the regular features are the well-known American advice columnist Dan Savage with his Savage Love, cartoons, and a local astrology column.
Special editions of The Straight include:
- The Golden Plate Awards - March
- The Best of Vancouver – September
The Best of Vancouver is a well known feature with whimsical notions of the best place for outdoor sex mixed in with more conventional awards such as Best Dining, Best Bar & Club and Best Radio Station.
The Straight has been criticised for publishing cigarette and other tobacco advertising when most publications in Canada have declined to do so for moral and ethical reasons. And of promoting local events that had tobacco industry sponsorship, such as the formerly Benson and Hedges-sponsored Symphony of Fire. The Straight has long been condemned for this practice by the major health groups and, more recently, by Vancouver businessman and political candidate Dale Jackaman in a series of Google attack ads.
The paper has received many awards. For example, in 1995, it received five "Western Magazine Awards", and, in the two years up to June 1996, it was nominated more than forty times and won twenty prizes, including three National Magazine Awards. In 1999, The Straight won eight Western Magazine Awards, including "Magazine of the Year", and its seventh consecutive, "Best Business Article".
On May 23, 2009, The Georgia Straight won the prize for "best magazine article of the year" for "The Pill Pushers" by Alex Roslin from the Canadian Association of Journalists.
The paper also gives many awards based on readers' polls:
- ". . . the Golden Plate Awards for local restaurants, the Straight Music Awards for local musicians, and the Best of Vancouver Awards for every type of business, service, activity, and weird stuff in the city, from the best bowling alley to the best Vancouver excuse for being late for work."
Read more about this topic: The Georgia Straight
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“Nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am evened with him, wife for wife,
Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor
At least into a jealousy so strong
That judgment cannot cure.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I were content to wearie out my paine,
To bee Narsissus so she were a spring
To drowne in hir those woes my heart do wring:
And more I wish transformed to remaine:
That whilest I thus in pleasures lappe did lye,
I might refresh desire, which else would die.”
—Thomas Lodge (1558?–1625)
“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)