Colorado Springs Independent won 21 awards and the Santa Fe Reporter won 12 awards. Westword editor Patricia Calhoun earned the Keeper of the Flame Award.
Boulder Weekly, Colorado Springs Independent, Salt Lake City Weekly, and the Santa Fe Reporter picked up awards in the Top of the Rockies contest.
Joel Dyer has been named editor of Boulder Weekly, succeeding Pamela White.
Boulder Weekly editor Pamela White has received one of the top honors given by the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), a lifetime achievement award called "Keeper of the Flame."
Five alt-weeklies were among the recent winners of The Society of Professional Journalists 2011 Top of the Rockies Excellence in Journalism Awards, covering Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming.
On May 27, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter signed Senate Bill 193 into law, making Colorado the ninth state to ban the shackling of inmates during labor and childbirth. The bill was inspired by Boulder Weekly editor Pamela White's investigation into the treatment of pregnant inmates in state prisons and jails. White was also key in drafting the legislation and pushing the bill forward. "I've written lots of news articles and opinion columns. I've written nine published novels," she says. "But I'd never written a bill."
The Society of Professional Journalists' Rocky Mountain chapter presented its "Top of the Rockies" Excellence in Journalism Awards Saturday night in Denver. The contest, with participants from the four-state region of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, attracted more than 500 entries. The Colorado Springs Independent took home nine awards, including first-place wins for Arts and Entertainment Reporting, Science/Environmental/Health Care Reporting, and Education Reporting. Salt Lake City Weekly won five awards, including first-place finishes in the General Reporting - Business and Investigative/Enterprise - Business categories. Boulder Weekly was given one award, a first-place finish in the Legal Affairs category.
In 2001, the alt-weekly adopted a new policy eliminating "adult" ads. But after taking a glance at the Personals section of a recent issue of the Weekly, Westword's Michael Roberts thinks the paper has reversed course. Weekly publisher Stewart Sallo tells AAN News via email that Roberts is incorrect. "Boulder Weekly's policy on 'sex ads' has not changed," he says. "We discontinued our adult advertising section in 2001 and redrew the line to eliminate ads that contain images that explicitly objectify women."
In the old days, when the media reported on problems in the newspaper industry, alternative newspapers weren't included. But alt-weeklies are immune no longer: In 2008, many AAN papers faced some of the same issues afflicting their mainstream brethren in the print media. However, you can still find alt-weeklies that had a pretty good year in 2008. That's just what AAN's editor Jon Whiten did, and he reports on 10 papers that increased revenue in a story published by Editor & Publisher.
"Boulder Weekly and our brother and sister alt-weeklies," Stewart Sallo writes, "are the next generation in the evolution of the newspaper." He notes that for the Weekly, "the past two years have been a watershed period for our organization, with unprecedented growth in readership and revenue, despite the unfavorable economic conditions we have faced."
