Archive for July, 2007

About Hitsville

Hitsville is edited by me, Bill Wyman. Write me at hitsville@gmail.com. I’m an arts editor by trade, most notably for Salon.com and National Public Radio.

Hitsville was originally the title of a column I wrote for the East Bay Express, back in Berkeley a millennium or so ago. Later I started it back up in Chicago, at the Chicago Reader, where I was a staff writer. I wrote about the Chicago rock scene (quite exciting at the time) and a lot of other things. The Reader archive was recently opened, incidentally, and available here.

I also started the radio talk show Sound Opinions with Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times. Jim still does the show, with Greg Kot, of the Chicago Tribune. It’s syndicated nationally through PRI. Home page is here.

After that I moved back to the Bay Area to be arts editor of SF Weekly. The paper had recently been bought by New Times, which over the years has grown to encompass most of the larger alternative papers in the U.S., including the Village Voice and LA Weekly. The company is now called Village Voice Media. (I go into such detail to be clear about potential conflicts of interests on matters I write about.)

I got fired eventually, but that’s par for the course at New Times. I worked at Slate, the internet magazine, for a bit, but just as a temporary editor. Then, through much of the Internet boom years in San Francisco, I was features editor and then arts & entertainment editor of Salon.com.

I was an arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a year, and then went to Washington D.C. in early 2003 to be an assistant managing editor at National Public Radio, where I oversaw the network’s arts, entertainment, media and digital coverage. In mid 2007, for family reasons, I moved to Phoenix, where I’m freelancing and getting back into internet journalism.

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