Creative Loafing Atlanta, Houston Press, Independent Weekly, L.A. Weekly, Phoenix New Times, and The Village Voice were among the honorees.
Independent Weekly, Mountain Xpress and Yes! Weekly recently received accolades from the organization.
Seattle Weekly food critic Hanna Raskin led a panel of alt-weekly scribes at the Association of Food Journalists' conference last week in Charleston. In addition, several alt-weekly food writers took home awards at the conference.
Seattle Weekly food critic Hanna Raskin will be leading a panel of alt-weekly scribes at the Association of Food Journalists' annual conference in Charleston, S.C -- and you're invited.
"After a year in which we had the most employees on staff in the paper's history -- 35 -- last week the Indy laid off two people, a reporter and the promotions coordinator, as well as reduced our freelance budget by 10 percent," Lisa Sorg writes in her editor's note this week. Sorg tells local blog Bull City Rising that the laid off employees are Vernal Coleman and Marny Rhodes, and that she and a number of other managers are taking voluntary pay cuts.
"I steered the paper in a populist direction, and viewed our job as to say what others could not, or would not," Sorg (pictured) writes in this week's issue. Sorg, who arrived in San Antonio five years ago and was named editor two years later, says she derived great joy working with the small editorial staff "to transform the Current into a credible, relevant, and indispensable publication -- one that offers the urgency of a newspaper and the context of a magazine." Satisfied that she accomplished what she set out to do, Sorg will continue to contribute to the paper as a freelance writer.
The Current kicks off its 20th anniversary year with a Jan. 18 retrospective of the paper's two decades, from breaking news about then-Mayor Henry Cisneros' adulterous affair, to the phallic cartoon that prompted businesses to ban the paper, to award-winning stories about media ownership. Journalist Steven G. Kellman writes of the newspaper culture in San Antonio: "Though the entire editorial staff of the Current is outnumbered by just the sports department at the Express-News, they keep the Hearst daily on its toes often by stepping on the toes of the powerful." The Current will auction framed digital prints of its most notable covers at four anniversary events over the course of the year.
When Lisa Sorg found out a Federal Communications Commission panel had scheduled a hearing in San Antonio, she wanted her community to be well prepared to talk about how media ownership affects what news they hear -- and don't hear. So the editor of the San Antonio Current and her small staff tackled the issue of conglomerates taking over the airwaves, turning out a two-part, multi-story series that won an AltWeekly Award for Media Reporting/Criticism. This is the 12th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
