AAN members were well-represented when the winners of the association's 2007 Better Newspaper Contest were announced this weekend. Syracuse New Times took home a total of nine awards, including first-place finishes in Best Advertising Campaign, Best House Ad/Ad Campaign, Graphic Illustration, Sports Feature, and Sports Feature Photo. Metroland won a total of seven awards, and staff writer David King was named 2007 Writer of the Year. Judges called King "a powerful writer, a master storyteller, and a thorough researcher whose convincing style grabs the reader and holds on tight -- navigating difficult subject matter, taking us to places we've never been, enabling us to understand things we never could." The New York Press came away with six awards, including first-place finishes in Best Front Page and Feature Story. The Ithaca Times took home four awards.
King Harris, managing editor of the San Luis Obispo weekly, was a television news anchor until two years ago. His April 13 cover story details the careers of seven anchors who have chosen to stay in the area despite opportunities elsewhere; the last profile is of Harris himself. He reveals that he "got into the business to tell stories about people" and was dismissed by a local station for being too "folksy."
According to NBC-affiliate KSBY, some area residents were upset by the paper's Feb. 2 cover package on methamphetamine, which included a recipe for manufacturing the drug. After the paper hit the streets, one former meth user suggested that citizens should take matters into their own hands: "Everybody should just get [copies of the paper] and burn them. It's just ridiculous." The next day, KSBY reported that "angry readers, recovering addicts, police, and drug counselors" were removing papers from the streets and pressuring store managers to do the same. Andrew Carter of Cellular One, which spends $52,000 annually advertising on the back cover of the New Times, said, "As the lead advertiser in the publication, they've not only, in my mind, embarrassed themselves, but they've embarrassed us." SLO New Times Managing Editor King Harris noted that "instructions for making meth are readily available on the Internet" and said the paper's intention was to inform people, "especially worried parents, about what to look for and what to consider suspicious."
