Patty Calhoun gave up the (cowboy) shirt off her back during pledge week on Denver's KBDI-Ch. 12, and in so doing she gained the attention of the Denver Post (here, third item). What happened, in her words: "The lovely teal cowboy shirt in question spent much of its life in my truck, and only got hauled out for respectable events -- such as AAN conventions and an occasional appearance on "Colorado Inside Out," the weekly public-affairs TV roundtable I'm on. One day, Westword's music editor reported that he'd run into some of the TV techs at a club, and they were talking about how much they hated that shirt. So the last time I wore it on TV, when the host was talking about how it was pledge week but our show was never pre-empted, I said I'd donate the dreaded shirt to whoever pledged $100. Someone did, so during last week's show, I took it off." But don't get the wrong idea -- Calhoun was wearing another shirt underneath.
The Denver-based alt-weekly won the Local/Regional Coverage category of the progressive magazine's competition. According to Utne's Web site, Westword was selected because "the arts coverage is refreshingly unaffected, the columnists routinely surprise, and the award-winning investigative work is as gutsy as it is well written." Nominees for the awards were chosen from among 2,000 alternative media sources.
Utne magazine has announced the nominees for its 2004 Independent Press Awards, and Association of Alternative Newsweeklies member papers dominate the "Local/Regional Coverage" category. Austin Chronicle, Chicago Reader, The Stranger, The Texas Observer and Westword all received nominations, as did Los Angeles CityBeat, an upstart alt-weekly that's only been publishing for 16 months. Nominees were chosen from among 2,000 alternative media sources. According to the Utne Web site, selection depended partly upon which publications were "most apt to go missing from the Utne library."
Wayne Laugesen of Colorado's Boulder Weekly believes there are times when a member of the media must cease being a spectator and take action. As such, he traded his usual pen for a sledgehammer and smashed a bunch of windows, reports Westword media critic Michael Roberts. Laugesen felt that an order directing homeowner Paul Wenig to reinstall antiquated windows he'd removed from his historic residence needlessly endangered two children who lived there. To Laugesen, destroying the windows was the obvious solution. Of the incident, he wrote in his Sept. 9 column: "Every broken window was a score for fatherhood, husbandry, and God-given liberty."
Patricia Calhoun, editor of Denver's Westword, joined director John Sayles and others associated with his new film, Silver City, on a promotional tour through Colorado. She has a cameo appearance as a journalist in the film. From her seat on the Silver City Express bus, she observes what happens as the movie premieres in several cities. Also on the tour was cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, whose work appears in many alt-weeklies.
Westword staff writer David Holthouse won't face criminal charges for allegedly having a friend follow a man he accused of raping him when he was a child. The man and his wife had contacted police when they noticed they were being followed, but the case fell apart when they refused to help prosecutors, John Ingold reports in the Denver Post. Holthouse defended his decision to have the man followed in an interview with 9News reporter Paula Woodward.
The Denver alt-weekly writer won a 2004 medal in the nondaily newspaper category for her story “Nowhere Boy,” which chronicles the struggle of an adoptive family to obtain mental health services for their severely emotionally troubled son. The article "touches on funding of the mental-health system, high-risk adoption and the various mental disorders and conditions linked to fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s a compelling subject done nicely," the judges commented. The awards are sponsored by the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families.
The Denver alt-weekly's Julie Jargon, 29, tied for first in the national reporting category for "The War Within," a series on rape of female cadets at the United States Air Force Academy. The Livingston Awards are given only to journalists under the age of 35. The $10,000 awards are the largest all-media, general-reporting prizes in the country.
Bob Grant, district attorney for Broomfield and Adams counties in Colorado, told the Denver Post's Sean Kelly Tuesday that David Holthouse's arrest was based solely on the suspicion that he followed an unnamed man over the weekend. The person Holthouse is accused of stalking is the man he says raped him when he was a 7-year-old. The 33-year-old Westword reporter is free on $2,500 bond.
