Fort Worth Weekly Editor Gayle Reaves, former investigative reporter Dan Malone and journalism professor Craig Flournoy were recently chosen as co-recipients of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas’ James Madison Award of 2006. The three were honored for their work on the Light of Day project, in which journalism students from several Texas universities filed hundreds of open records requests with local law enforcement agencies on their use of Tasers and other non-lethal measures. The best of the resultant stories were printed in the Weekly. The Madison award was presented Friday at the FOIFT annual convention in Austin.
Having reached "the tweener stage," the Weekly is proud of its warts-and-all history, which is recounted in this week's cover story. From its early days as "a raucous conglomerate of gays, old hippies, cynical journalists, fresh-faced young writers, revolving-door sales reps, and tart-tongued receptionists" facing fierce opposition from the local daily, through its sale to New Times in 2000 and resale to Lee Newquist the following year, the Weekly has focused on "critiquing the emperor’s new clothes" and has stuck by a statement made in the first issue: "We're having fun. ... And we plan to be around for a long, long time."
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.
The Society of Environmental Journalists awarded the first-place prize for Outstanding Small Market Reporting to freelancer Wendy Lyons Sunshine for "Mud Wrestling," a three-part series about "the environmental damage caused by the fast-growing region's ravenous appetite for construction stone."
The Texas alt-weekly was among those nominated in the "Outstanding Small Market Reporting, Print" category of the Society of Environmental Journalists' 4th Annual Awards contest. Writer Wendy Lyons Sunshine's "Mud Wrestling" series garnered the honor.
Eric Celeste muses in the Dallas Observer on the departure of Lee Newquist from New Times and the future of Fort Worth Weekly in the post-John Forsyth era.
In an unsigned column, Fort Worth Weekly bids farewell to its "fiercely independent and damn-the-torpedoes" editor John Forsyth, who was fired this week by new owner Lee Newquist. "We can only hope that Lee Newquist will make good on his promise to support the same kind of gutsy journalism that Forsyth did," says the author(s).
