Last year, for the first time, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conducted its editorial contest online. Although there were some frustrating glitches, entrants overwhelmingly favored the online method of entering the AltWeekly Awards. This year, AAN used feedback from member papers and judges to make improvements, including more specific instructions to make uploading PDFs easier. The 2006 AltWeekly Awards Web site will be launched on Dec. 5.
When Lisa Sorg found out a Federal Communications Commission panel had scheduled a hearing in San Antonio, she wanted her community to be well prepared to talk about how media ownership affects what news they hear -- and don't hear. So the editor of the San Antonio Current and her small staff tackled the issue of conglomerates taking over the airwaves, turning out a two-part, multi-story series that won an AltWeekly Award for Media Reporting/Criticism. This is the 12th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
Inspired by German illustrator George Grosz, Rick Sealock takes an ornery-manner approach to his art. He distorts the humans and animals he creates in the hopes viewers will draw a social and political message from his work. The Canadian illustrator took both first-place AltWeekly Awards in Illustration this year. This is the 11th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
It wasn't a phoned-in tip that led to Tara Servatius's story for Creative Loafing (Charlotte), "Flawed Priorities," but some statistics she stumbled across on a Web site. Once she started crunching numbers, she was hooked. Her inquiry led her to draw some pointed conclusions about why students at certain Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were lagging behind other students. This is the 10th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
Amy Gill's primary responsibility will be the association's aan.org Web site. She comes to AAN from the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental advocacy nonprofit where she had been the director of operations. She was also previously a staff writer at Impact News/Southern Voice, a New Orleans-based GLBT weekly.
Michael Little, a freelancer for Washington City Paper, knows what he likes to write about: "failure and futility -- and losers." That fascination led him to write an arts feature about a woman consigned to an insane asylum in the early 1900s who produced a piece of lace that hinted at her dark sexual story. This is the ninth in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
Jen Sorensen's comic strip, Slowpoke, has moved a bit away from social commentary in the past few years to be more political. Her ideas come from, among other places, progressive blogs. She describes here how she draws her cartoon, what inspires her and the creative process. This is the eighth in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
The scoop Nigel Jaquiss got about political leader Neil Goldschmidt was one that would create a terrible stir in Oregon, if only he could nail it down. If he couldn't lay out sufficient proof, he risked destroying his paper, Willamette Week. Jaquiss describes the twists and turns that led to the publication of the stories that won him the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting, along with an AltWeekly Award. This is the seventh in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
An abnormally high number of children in Sierra Vista, Ariz., were getting leukemia, but government agencies had repeatedly declined to investigate the cause of the cancer cluster. Freelance writer Renee Downing stepped into the breach. In her article for Tucson Weekly, "Cancer Wars," she discusses two scientists' research exploring a possible environmental link as well as the politics surrounding the identification of a cancer cluster. This is the sixth in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
