The Weekly won five editorial awards in this year's Arizona Newspapers Association's Better Newspapers Contest, including first place finishes for Best Lifestyle Feature, Best News Story and Best Sustained Coverage.
Gambit publisher Margo DuBos and her husband, political editor Clancy DuBos, will be honored with the Anti-Defamation League's A.I. Botnick "Torch of Liberty Award" at a Dec. 14 dinner in New Orleans. "Under the direction of Margo and Clancy, Gambit has won scores of local, regional and national awards for innovative, incisive and robust journalism," the letter from the ADL reads. "The weekly's editorial positions reflect the ADL's commitment to equal opportunity and opposition to bigotry in any form."
The Weekly celebrates an historic milestone with a special 20th anniversary issue that hit the streets (and the web) yesterday. The 200-page issue, which is saddle stitched and features the Weekly's first-ever glossy cover, "takes a long backwards glance at the people, the institutions, the buildings, the parties and the natural disasters that have helped shape the community" since Coast Weekly (the paper's original name) debuted in the fall of 1988. "The community support has been fantastic for this issue, in much the same way it has been for the last twenty years," says founder and CEO Bradley Zeve.
The Jacksonville, Fla., alt-weekly first requested a document related to the city's NFL team, the Jaguars, in March 2004. The city initially told Folio that it did not possess the document the paper was requesting, a claim it made repeatedly over the next three years in regards to other football-related documents. Only after the paper spent more than $9,000 on an attorney and threatened legal action did the city finally admit it actually did have the requested documents. Turns out Jacksonville had 25 boxes worth of documents related to the football stadium renovations and the city's bid to host the Super Bowl. "Our quest to obtain the records ended with a small victory -- the city provided many documents and repaid $5,000 of our legal fees," writes Folio's Marvin Edwards. "But it also highlighted the city's contempt for public records laws, and its utter lack of accountability."
Facing a tough economic climate, two AAN members had to lay off several employees last week. The Las Vegas Weekly let go "a writer and an art staffer," as part of larger staff reductions by parent company Greenspun Media Group, the Las-Vegas Review-Journal reports. In addition, The Village Voice laid off two staff writers and a deputy copy chief, according to Pop + Politics.
In the sixth installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, OC Weekly staffer and ¡Ask a Mexican! columnist Gustavo Arellano discusses his column, which for the second time in three years won a first-place AltWeekly Award. He also talks to Elena Brown about getting hate mail, the immigration debate, and what he likes about writing for alt-weeklies. "At a daily newspaper, they ask you to do one thing and one thing only. I'd get so bored so fast I'd quit my job," Arellano says. "Here, I could write about anything, so long as it's good. That freedom is so intoxicating I can't see why anybody would not want a job like mine."
Jeff Prince was working on a story about a group of patients who were helping their doctor try to regain his medical license. The doc specialized in treating chronic pain and was the only professional in the area willing to prescribe drugs like oxycodone, so when his license was suspended his patients went without meds. One such patient was David Noblett, who sustained severe back injuries in the Vietnam war that gave him decades of agony. As Prince was wrapping up the story, he called Noblett at home to let him know he was coming over to snap a cover photo. But when Prince arrived 30 minutes later, he found Noblett slumped in a chair, dead. The doctor tells the Weekly that four of his patients have committed suicide since his license was suspended. Noblett's official cause of death won't be confirmed until the medical examiner's office does a toxicology report.
Kevin Allman will take over as Gambit editor next week, replacing Clancy DuBos, who will remain on staff as political editor. DuBos co-owns the paper with his wife, publisher and CEO Margo DuBos, and is chairman of Gambit Communications Inc. "There are journalists in this country that would kill to be able to enterprise their own stories, work their own beats, and get the space they need to do their craft. They can do that at Gambit," Allman writes on his blog. "Now I get to join them, and I can't tell you how happy I am about that."
Fast Forward Weekly, the alt-weekly in Calgary, Canada, published a story Sept. 25 that quoted a Calgary Member of Parliament making comments linking immigrants to crime in the middle of an election campaign. Lee Richardson made the comments in a telephone interview with the paper, and as soon as the story was published, it was picked up in the local and national media. The following day, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper dismissed the story as a ridiculous example of "gotcha journalism" -- even though the paper had phoned Richardson after the initial interview to ask him to clarify his remarks. (Richardson's retraction was included in the Fast Forward story.) The story even warrented a mention on Comedy Central's election blog.
Fast Forward Weekly's Drew Anderson earned a first-place award in the best feature story by a local writer category at the Alberta Weekly Newspaper Association's Awards of Excellence 2008. The story examined the practice of clearcut logging in Alberta and the controversy caused by logging in the Bragg Creek area of Kananaskis Country. "I was surprised by how complex the arguments for and against clear-cutting actually are," says Anderson. "The debate has become so politicized and so emotional, that the science is often excluded in popular discussions."
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