The contest website will open Tue., Dec. 15, 2009 and will close on the contest deadline, Mon., Feb. 8, 2010 at 11 pm (EST).

There are now three separate blog categories: Group/Staff Blog, Individual Blog, and Music Blog. There is also a new award for the best use of Multimedia. The Wild Card category is Health Care.

Download the complete contest rules here.

Continue ReadingAAN Releases Guidelines for 2010 AltWeekly Awards

The judges came from academia and the newsroom, and they reviewed entries from as far away as Mexico City and Beirut. Many judges began their careers at an alt-weekly and several were fellows at the Academy for Alternative Journalism. A selection of their remarks on the winning entries has been compiled into a pdf document.

Continue ReadingAAN Releases AltWeekly Awards Judges Bios & Comments

The 2009 AltWeekly Awards is now accepting entries. The contest website opened Mon., Dec. 1, 2008 and will close on the contest deadline, Fri., Jan. 30, 2009 at midnight (EST). This year’s Wild Card category is Election Coverage. The winners will be announced at the 32nd Annual AAN Convention taking place June 25-27, 2009 in Tucson, Ariz.

Continue ReadingCall for Entries: 2009 AltWeekly Awards

In the third installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, Malcolm Gay, a regular freelancer for Riverfront Times, talks to Corina Knoll about his feature profile of author Qiu Xiaolong. Gay, who was formerly a Village Voice Media fellow at the East Bay Express and staff writer at the RFT, says he learned how challenging it is to write about a writer. "What they do physically and in terms of their day-to-day existence is very uneventful. So it's hard to bring drama and animation to those scenes," he says. "That's the challenge: to access that inner world and make it evident in the story."

Continue ReadingHow I Got That Story: Malcolm Gay

Former Gambit Weekly Editor Michael Tisserand won first place in the Individual Feature Writing Category of the 2005 Louisiana Press Association journalism competition, the LPA announced this weekend. Tisserand won for an entry from his "Submerged" series that also ran as a cover story for Lafayette's Independent Weekly, which competes in the Free Circulation/Special Interest Publication category against other weeklies in the state. Tisserand's ten-part series chronicling the Katrina-evacuee experience was commissioned by AAN and ran in dozens of AAN member papers and Web sites. The Independent, a three-year old publication applying for AAN membership this year, earned 50 awards in the competition, including 21 first-place honors. Gannett's competing weekly in Lafayette, the Times of Acadiana, picked up 27 awards.

Continue ReadingArticle from ‘Submerged’ Series Wins Press Association Contest

Foodies at Creative Loafing (Atlanta), Riverfront Times, Westword, L.A. Weekly, East Bay Express, City Pages (Twin Cities), Phoenix New Times, and Houston Press picked up ten of the 21 nominations for which they qualified in the 2006 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards announced today. The complete list is available as a PDF here. Alt-weeklies were particularly dominant in the "Newspaper Writing on Spirits, Wine or Beer" category, in which all three nominees are AAN members. The awards recognize and honor excellence and achievement in the culinary arts.

Continue ReadingAlt-Weeklies Lap Up Nominations in Food-Writing Awards