We came back from the recent awards banquet with good news. The Detroit Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists gave us eight awards in the competition among papers with circulations of 100,000 and above — basically, little ol' us and the city's dailies. Our arts and culture editor, Rebecca Mazzei, took a first place for criticism. Our design director, Sean Bieri, won first and second place for magazine cover design, first place for magazine spread design, and second place for editorial page design. News editor Curt Guyette won third place for investigative reporting, features editor Brian Smith won third place for feature news reporting, and columnist Jack Lessenberry won third place for news columnist.
And those are in addition to recent citations from the Association of Alternative Newspapers. At the association's recent convention in Portland, Ore., Curt Guyette won an honorable mention for feature writing and our Web site placed second in Web site design.
Meanwhile, Sandra Svoboda's recent cover story on military contractors has been republished as a cover story for four alt-weeklies across the country and is slated to run in a fifth this week.
We work hard at this. We're happy to know how many thousands and thousands of you pick up a copy or visit our Web site weekly, and we're happy when our peers in the business give us a high-five of approval to boot.
And we're striving to give you more all the time. Peruse our listings and see more detailed event descriptions under our new listings editor Meghana Keshavan. Watch for a new biweekly nightlife column from Laurie Smolenski, who gives us our cover story this week. Next month internationally respected music journalist Bill Holdship joins us as music editor and main keeper of the Music Blahg. He's spent time at CREEM and Billboard and written for everyone from Metro Times to Mojo to Rolling Stone. But he'll tell you more about that when he gets here and becomes one more reason to read MT every week. And you can get this for free?
