Fort Worth Weekly took home best-newspaper honors Saturday (Nov. 5) in the six-state Katie Awards competition sponsored by the Press Club of Dallas. It’s the second year running that the Fort Worth alt-weekly has won the honor in the under-100,000 circulation “special interest publication” category.

The Weekly also won two other major awards in its division of the Katies. Staff writer Dan Malone took the Investigative Reporting first, with his latest cover story about a former diving coach and real estate salesman to Fort Worth’s upper crust who has been implicated in a pattern of child molestation going back more than 40 years. Malone has been writing about the ex-coach, Wirt Norris, in a series of investigative pieces that started three years ago.

And staffer Betty Brink won in the Series category, with the help of former high school intern Brooke Gray, for the same coverage that won an AAN award earlier this year. Their stories revealed the influence-peddling that went into the decision by Fort Worth school administrators to spend millions of dollars on a highly controversial computerized math program at a time when the district was struggling financially.