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.
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.
Ruth Hammond will be stepping down as AAN's editorial director on Dec. 23 to take a job as a senior copy editor with The Chronicle of Higher Education. During her two years at AAN, Ruth participated in the launch of AltWeeklies.com and kept the site running; she also administered the AltWeekly Awards contest, including the contest's move to an online format last year. In reflecting on her work at AAN, Ruth says, "what strikes me most is how much teamwork went into all my projects."
The online registration system first implemented for the 2005 AltWeekly Awards contest is back -- with some improvements. A new category! An earlier deadline! Different ways to submit! Learn more about the changes here.
Marc Desilets, the senior classified sales representative at Tucson Weekly, collected his AAN CAN prize and traveled to New York City over the Thanksgiving holiday. Desilets won the three-night trip for two by selling $43,095 in national ads during the summer 2005 AAN CAN contest.
The Association for Alternative Newsweeklies is holding another contest for sales representatives who sell ads into the AAN CAN Network. The rep who sells the most total dollars from new advertisers into the AAN CAN Network between Nov. 10, 2005 and Jan. 30, 2006 will receive a 9-day trip for two to sunny Peru.
One of the secret weapons in Betty Brink's reporting arsenal is the way she looks. Because she cuts a grandmotherly figure, people can't help but confide in her. The reporter who started out at an underground paper in college now does award-winning news reporting for Fort Worth Weekly. This is the 17th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
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.
This year AAN put out no ordinary awards book. Among the honored first-place entries is a Pulitzer Prize-winning story by Willamette Week's Nigel Jaquiss. "Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2005" offers a wide selection of riveting reading, produced by some seasoned writers and others just beginning to make their mark. The bookstore-quality volume is designed to reach a wider audience than ever.
Judges' critiques of the 2005 AltWeekly Awards winners can now be downloaded for review. The same comments will appear in AAN Press's forthcoming book, Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2005. Individual newspapers can also obtain summaries of remarks on all of their entries.
