Richard T. Jameson has been named editor of Queen Anne/Magnolia News by publisher Mike Dillon.
Jameson has lived in Seattle for 27 of the last 38 years and in Queen Anne since 2000.
Recently a layout artist for Pacific Publishing Company, parent company to the News, he replaces Maggie Larrick, editor of the News since October 2000. Larrick is pursuing a career in book editing and will contribute occasional articles to the News in future.
"Maggie did a great job for us," Dillon said. "The paper has certainly made great strides under her stewardship. She helped bring about a nice balance between hard news, arts coverage and community news. Richard, with his wealth of experience and roots in the community, is the right person to fill Maggie's shoes."
A well-known figure in the local film scene, Jameson has also amassed considerable experience with a variety of publications, and the two interests have merged over the years in interesting ways.
He came to Seattle from Pennsylvania in 1965 to attend the University of Washington's graduate school in English, but soon found his interest deflected by a wealth of opportunities for a hitherto-small-town boy to see and talk about movies. After running the student film series on campus for two years, Jameson went to work part-time as relief house manager of the Ridge-mont Theatre in Greenwood and the Edgemont Theatre in Edmonds. In fall 1967 he became full-time manager and co-programmer of the Edgemont, which operated through the turn of the '70s as the only movie theater in the greater Seattle area consistently committed to showing foreign and classic films.
During this period, Jameson also started writing seriously about film - detailed program notes for university film series, articles for magazines such as Film Quarterly in Berkeley, Calif., and reviews for Helix, Seattle's weekly counterculture publication. In 1969 he also began designing and teaching film courses at the University of Washington, something he would continue to do for more than a decade.
Jameson served as the first president of the Seattle Film Society, a nonprofit he helped found in 1971. He contributed to the society's ambitious programming - again, dominated by classics and foreign films - and helped start its newsletter, Movietone News. Under his editorship, Movietone News soon evolved into a lively film journal that won a national and international, as well as local, readership.
Jameson's other principal journalistic involvement at the time was serving as the first film critic of The Weekly (the original name for what became Seattle Weekly in 1986). Weekly reviewing was followed by a stint at Pacific Northwest magazine.
Then, in 1989, Jameson was offered a year's work as film critic of 7 Days, an award-winning weekly magazine in New York City. According to Jameson, he "went - did not move - there, because a year was only a year, and be-sides I had no idea whether I'd hate the place."
He didn't hate the place.
He went on to become editor at Film Comment, a glossy bimonthly published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and regarded, at the time, as the finest film magazine in the English language. He remained editor for more than 10 years.
A member of the prestigious National Society of Film Critics since 1980, Jameson edited its 1994 anthology "They Went Thataway: Redefining Film Genres." In 1996, with his wife, writer and critic Kathleen Murphy, he compiled and edited a database of 2,000 cinema biographies for Microsoft Cinemania.
In 2000 the Jamesons decided it was time to leave New York City. Back in Seattle - residing on the northeast face of Queen Anne Hill - Jameson contributed articles to The New York Times and New York Daily News. Last year he was given the George Bailey Award from the Northwest Film Forum for his service to the local film community.
As for the Queen Anne News & Magnolia News, "I want to continue to make the newspaper more flexible and responsive in its news coverage and design," Jameson said. "I hope people will enjoy reading it at least as half as much as I'll enjoy doing it."
