The Canadian Community Newspaper Association recognized Fast Forward Weekly with a Blue Ribbon for general excellence, as well as first place nods for best historical story and best multimedia feature in its annual competition.
Fast Forward Weekly publisher and founding editor Ian Chiclo has left the publishing industry to become director of digital marketing for Tourism Calgary.
Rick Anderson's Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, Dirty Money, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City explores Seattle's dark underbelly.
In the twelfth installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Jeffrey Anderson talks about his multi-part investigative series "The Town the Law Forgot," which uncovered shocking abuses of power by government officials in Los Angeles County. He tells Sam Stoker how he started on this thread, and how he kept at it until it all started to unravel for him. Anderson, who wrote the series for L.A. Weekly but has since changed coast and is a staffer at Baltimore City Paper, also gives some advice to anyone undertaking an investigation. "The main thing is you just can't plan things out in advance," he says. "Things don't occur logically sometimes. You just need to be ready to revive things you have let go of. You just can't plan it."
Fast Forward Weekly's Drew Anderson earned a first-place award in the best feature story by a local writer category at the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association's Awards of Excellence 2008. The story examined the practice of clearcut logging in Alberta and the controversy caused by logging in the Bragg Creek area of Kananaskis Country. "I was surprised by how complex the arguments for and against clear-cutting actually are," says Anderson. "The debate has become so politicized and so emotional, that the science is often excluded in popular discussions."