Adam Clay Thompson has won the 2005 George Polk Award for Local Reporting, Editor & Publisher reports. Thompson, a senior writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, won for his series "Forgotten City," which exposed poor living conditions in San Francisco's public housing. The Polk Awards have been awarded by Long Island University since 1949.
The last issue of The Local Planet, an AAN-member paper in Spokane, Wash., was distributed July 8. A year ago, publisher Matt Spaur's wife, founding editor Connye Miller, died, and Spaur said he no longer had the interest or energy to keep publishing. During the "feisty" paper's four-year run, it "poked at Spokane's conservative establishment and took readers on irreverent romps through the region's political, music and dating scenes," The Spokesman-Review's John Stucke writes. Spokane is home to another AAN member, The Pacific Northwest Inlander.
The Local Planet Weekly's Founding Editor and Co-Publisher, Connye Miller, died June 15 of complications related to the rare disease porphyria. Matt Spaur, her husband and co-publisher, remembers her in 475 words of poetry, pain and love.
Spokane, Wash., City Councilman Steve Eugster has dropped a libel suit against The Local Planet Weekly's parent company. He claimed the Local Planet defamed him in a column that suggested he followed no law but his own and depicted him with a pitchfork and horns.
Tom Grant, editor of the Local Planet Weekly, announces that he's leaving his job and running for mayor of Spokane, Wash. Grant has been a journalist for 23 years, primarily as an investigative television reporter. His reporting helped free more than a dozen innocent people from jail in the mid-1990s, and he recently helped uncover a secret deal in Spokane by which millions in taxpayer dollars were being diverted to the richest family in town. He has been with The Local Planet for two years.
Alternative newsweeklies have found myriad ways to team up with competitors for lucrative cross-promotional arrangements. Radio is perhaps the most common partner for alt-weeklies and music events the most frequent vehicle for cooperation, Ann Hinch writes for AAN News. Television and even print, however, have been mined by AAN members “to reach a broader audience and more diverse demographic.”
