One-hundred-forty-one judges evaluated the entries in the 2005 Alternative Newsweekly Awards. Five categories -- Cartoon, Cover Design, Editorial Layout, Illustration and Photography -- went through a single round of judging. In the 14 other categories, there were two rounds. The preliminary judges narrowed the choices down to six to nine entries in each size division of a given category, and the final judges determined the
order of finish. Several judges recused themselves from considering a particular entry because of a relationship with the paper involved, and those entries were reassigned. The judges' bios -- and commentary -- will be included in "Best AltWeekly Writing and Design 2005," a book reprinting this year's first-place winners that will be sent to AAN member papers in August. If you would like to nominate yourself or someone else to be a judge for the 2006 awards, write to contest administrator
Ruth Hammond. Nominees should be accomplished journalists in the area they'll be judging and should value the editorial goals of alternative newsweeklies. A past affiliation with an alternative weekly is helpful, but nominees should not have worked for a paper belonging to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in the past two years. Click on the link by each category to read the names and bios of this year's judges.
First Round
Chris Barsanti is a regular contributor to numerous magazines and Web sites, including Kirkus Reviews, filmcritic.com, Publishers Weekly and Slant. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and New York Film Critics Online.
Amanda Cuda is a features writer at the Connecticut Post newspaper in Bridgeport, Conn., where she also lives. Her work requires her to cover topics ranging from health to women's issues to entertainment and lifestyles. She has also freelanced for several publications, including the book review Web site Curled Up With a Good Book (www.curledup.com). Past honors include a second place and two honorable mention awards from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists.
Mary Ann Grossmann is book critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Jeremy McCarter is the chief theater critic of The New York Sun. Prior to joining the paper, he was a writer and editor at The New Republic, where he remains as a contributing editor. He has written for The New York Times, Slate and MTV Magazine. McCarter, who studied history at Harvard, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
James (J.R.) Norton is the research director for The Al Franken Show on Air America Radio. He's also the author of The Weekly Shredder, an online political column (www.weeklyshredder.com). He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
David Sterritt is film critic of The Christian Science Monitor and a film professor at Long Island University and Columbia University. Although he now lives in New York, many years ago he was editor of Boston After Dark, now The Boston Phoenix. He has published books on Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam and the Beat Generation. Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Reader is due later this year.
David Thomas is a video-game critic, researcher and teacher. He founded and runs the International Game Journalists Association and writes regularly for the Denver Post and the Grand Rapids Press. Thomas teaches critical video-game theory and the history of digital media for the University of Colorado at Denver and is working on a book about video games. He can be found online at www.buzzcut.com.
David Walton teaches literature and writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of a novel, Ride (Penguin Books), and of two collections of short stories, Waiting in Line and Evening Out, which received the Flannery O'Connor Award. He reviews books regularly for a number of newspapers.
Final Round
David Bonetti is visual arts critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. From 1984 to 1989, he was art critic of The Boston Phoenix. While at The Phoenix, he won the Manufacturers Hanover Trust "Critic's Choice" award. He has also been art critic at the San Francisco Examiner and, later, the San Francisco Chronicle. Bonetti has taught at Brown University, Boston College, the University of Massachusetts in Boston and the San Francisco Art Institute. He has lectured widely on issues of contemporary art and has contributed essays to a number of catalogs. He has also written for The Boston Globe, Art in America, Art News, Arts International, Playbill and other publications.
Michael Booth is a movie critic and entertainment writer for The Denver Post. He has previously written about the environment, state and local government, and other issues. His humor column won the Best of the West competition and his story "Boy Wonder" won the feature competition of the National Education Writers Association in 2005.
Thomas Curwen is the editor of the Los Angeles Times' Outdoors section. Prior to that, he was a writer for the paper's features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. In 2004 he was honored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors. He has a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002 he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.
First Round
Allan Antliff holds the Canada Research Chair in Art History at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001) and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004). In addition to teaching, he serves on the editorial board of the Alternative Press Review and is arts editor of the United Kingdom-based journal Anarchist Studies. His reviews and articles have appeared in Canadian Art Magazine, C Magazine, Fuse, ArtNexus, Artichoke, VUE Magazine and Mix. He is also a long-time contributor to the underground press.
Chris Beringer is deputy managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She joined the paper in 1987 as arts and entertainment editor after stints editing news and features in Minneapolis at the Star and Star-Tribune, and in Chicago at the Daily News and Sun-Times. She is past president of the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors.
Glenn Harper is editor of Sculpture magazine, based in Washington. D.C. His writings on art have appeared in Art Papers, Aperture, Artforum, Public Art Review, On View, Afterimage and many other publications. He is the editor of Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance, a collection of interviews with contemporary artists; and he has contributed articles and interviews to a number of books and exhibition catalogues.
Heather Joslyn is senior editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Before that she oversaw the arts section of Baltimore City Paper for several years. In her spare time, she also served as the alternative weekly's managing editor. She lives in Baltimore, where she reads, watches movies and plays the devil's music.
Meghan Keane is assistant arts editor at The New York Sun. She was previously an editorial associate at National Review and a reporter at the Daily Deal. She was a Koch fellow in 2002.
Thomas Leitch teaches English and directs the film studies program at the University of Delaware. Since 1989 he has reviewed mystery and suspense fiction for Kirkus Reviews, where he is senior editor. His most recent books are Crime Films and Perry Mason.
Choire Sicha is a freelance journalist and critic in New York City. He writes frequently on culture for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. He is the former editorial director of Gawker Media, and the former editor of Gawker.com.
Robert Simonson has, since 1998, been the editor in chief of the theatre news Web site Playbill.com. He has frequently written about the arts for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Time Out New York and The New York Sun. His books include Role of a Lifetime (1999), Cafe Society (2000) and On Broadway, Men Still Wear Hats (2004). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Commentary. His work has appeared in, among other places, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Fortune, the RaleighNews & Observer and the Greensboro News and Record.
András Szántó is the director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Szántó has coauthored and edited three books as well as numerous critical essays and research reports about culture, media and arts policy. His reporting and commentary about art, culture and politics have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Newsday, Interiors, Architecture, Print, I.D., International Herald Tribune, Variety, MSNBC and other domestic and international publications.
Lawrence Toppman has been the movie critic at The Charlotte Observer since 1987. Before that, he was a theater critic and general assignment arts reporter for The Observer and the now-defunct Charlotte News. He has been named North Carolina Press Association Critic of the Year and has coauthored a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Affair of the Unprincipled Publisher (Oak Knoll Books), with Steven Garland. He has acted in more than 50 productions, most of them as a chorus member for Opera Carolina, a regional opera company.
Lars Trodson has been a newspaper writer and editor for almost 20 years. He is currently the features editor for George J. Foster & Co. Publications and writes a weekly column for The News, out of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. He is a published poet and a produced playwright, and is the writer and producer of two independent films. Trodson recently finished writing a nonfiction book told from the point of view of the foot soldier in the Civil War. He resides with his wife, Judith Levine, in Maine.
Final Round
Lisa Fung is arts editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she oversees coverage of theater, classical music, dance, opera, visual arts, architecture and culture. She joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times in 1988 in the Metro/Suburban section before moving on to help launch the Times' National Edition. In 1994 Fung joined the Times' business staff, where she oversaw personal finance, entertainment business and technology coverage. She was named technology editor in 1997. Prior to coming to the Times, she worked at The Des Moines Register as a reporter and editor on the news and features desks.
Jodi Kantor is the editor of The New York Times' Arts & Leisure section. Since her appointment in 2003, she has introduced a new design, new writers and new features. Before coming to the Times, she was the New York editor of Slate.com. A graduate of Columbia University and a Harvard Law School dropout, Kantor lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Lieber.
Richard Rhodes is the editor of Canadian Art magazine and the author of A First Book of Canadian Art. He has written on art for more than 25 years for numerous publications, including Artforum. He is also an independent curator and photographer. In 2003 Rhodes received the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Achievement Award. He lectures frequently on contemporary art.
Kathryn LeMieux is one of six women who contribute to the nationally syndicated "Six Chix" comic strip. Her contributions appear on Fridays. "Feral West," her cartoon for the Point Reyes Light newspaper, has won three California Newspaper Publisher Awards. Earlier, she contributed to the underground comic book Wimmens Comix. She is also a fine-art painter whose work is shown exclusively at the Bodega Landmark Gallery in Bodega, Calif. LeMieux has created cover art for the alternative weekly Pacific Sun. She lives in rural Tomales, Calif., and has a studio in a renovated chicken coop.
Jimmy Margulies became editorial cartoonist for The Record in Hackensack, N.J., in 1990, after six years as editorial cartoonist for The Houston Post. His cartoons are distributed by King Features to more than 400 newspapers and appear in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Business Week and many other publications, and on news shows. In 1996 Margulies won both The National Headline Award for editorial cartoons, and the Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition, and he has placed in several other award competitions. He is proud to have earned a place on the National Rifle Association blacklist. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, he and his wife, Martha, have two children.
Rob Rogers is a staff editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His work is nationally syndicated by United Feature Syndicate and regularly appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek and many other publications. His interest in political cartooning was cultivated at Oklahoma State University, where he drew for the college paper. He has a master's of fine arts in painting from Carnegie Mellon University. Rogers has received the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award and the 1995 National Headliner Award. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.
First Round
Madeleine Begun Kane is a New York City-based humor columnist, recovering lawyer and musician whose columns, song parodies and satirical poems have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and anthologies. The National Society of Newspaper Columnists honored her work as a humorist in 1996. Her personal humor site, www.madkane.com, has garnered awards from such publications as USA Today, Shift Magazine, Maxim Magazine and The Guardian.
Maralyn Lois Polak is a spoken-word artist, journalist, editor and radio personality. She writes Left-Handed, a controversial weekly interactive political satire commentary column for a leading independent Internet news site, WND.com. With architect Benjamin Nia, she recently completed her first documentary short on DVD: My Hometown: Preservation or Development? She also authored the experimental online serialized meta-novel, Man in Her Mind: Further Adventures of Boris and Natasha; and a cartoon book, Anoushka on Her Deathbed: 101 Cartoons From the Abyss.
Tommy Tomlinson has written a column for The Charlotte Observer since 1997. In 2004 The Week magazine named him the best local columnist in America. He also won the American Society of Newspaper Editors' award for profile writing. Tomlinson claims, unless someone can prove otherwise, that he is the only journalist in history to cover the Super Bowl, the Bassmaster Classic and the National Spelling Bee in the same year.
Jeffrey Zaslow is a senior writer and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. His column, Moving On, focuses on life transitions. In 2003 it was named best general interest column among newspapers with more than 100,000 circulation in a contest sponsored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Earlier, he wrote an advice column for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Final Round
Randy Kennedy has been a reporter for The New York Times for 11 years. He works in the cultural news department covering the art world. For three years, he wrote the weekly Tunnel Vision column about life underground. A collection of the columns, titled Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York (St. Martin's Press, 2004) was named an editor's choice selection by Entertainment Weekly magazine and is in its fifth printing. Before The Times, Kennedy worked as a reporter for American Lawyer magazine and as a trial researcher for Court Television. He is a graduate of the University of Texas. He and his wife, Janet, a psychologist, live in Brooklyn with their son, Leo.
Colbert I. King is the deputy editorial page editor and a columnist for The Washington Post. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The judges recognized him for his "against-the-grain columns that speak to people in power with ferocity and wisdom." Before joining The Post in 1990, he served as an executive vice president and member of the board of directors of the Riggs National Bank of Washington, D.C.
Dennis Roddy is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Scripps Howard Foundation gave him its top award for commentary in 2001, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists named him the best humor columnist in 2000. He worked as a political reporter for the Pittsburgh Press before it was acquired by the Post-Gazette. He is married to Post-Gazette business writer Joyce Gannon and has four children.
First Round
Richard Broderick teaches English and journalism at Anoka Ramsey Community College. He is the author of two books and a recipient of a 2003 Minnesota Book Award. Broderick also wrote for the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader, where he initiated the paper's media watchdog column, and was a contributing editor for City Pages.
Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte is an associate professor in journalism, Latin American studies, and women and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She developed the first course in the nation to teach non-minority journalism students how to cover underrepresented communities. Formerly, de Uriarte was an assistant editor and writer at the Los Angeles Times, where she was responsible for expanding coverage of Mexico and Central America, as well as that of U.S. minority communities.
Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason, a libertarian monthly magazine headquartered in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon and many other publications. He has been a commentator on radio and television programs such as National Public Radio's All Things Considered, CNN's American Morning, Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor and C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Earlier, Gillespie wrote under the name Mr. Mxyzptlk for the satire Web site Suck.
Matt Welch is an associate editor and media columnist for Reason magazine, columnist for Canada's National Post, and proprietor of the popular Weblog Mattwelch.com/warblog.html. He's a nine-time Los Angeles Press Club award winner and was involved in Richard Riordan's doomed attempt to launch an alt-weekly in Los Angeles. He founded the first English-language publication in the post-communist East Bloc and has written for the Columbia Journalism Review, Salon, Wired News and many other publications.
Final Round
Peter D. Bunzel is retired and lives in Los Angeles. His journalism career includes serving as desk editor and then columnist at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner; and as editor of the Los Angeles Times' West Magazine and later editor of the paper's Op-Ed page and Sunday Opinion section. He was founding editor of Seattle Magazine. Early in his career, Bunzel was a Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker and a reporter and associate editor for Life magazine. He contributed theatrical reviews to the L.A. Reader in the late 1980s.
Ray Hanania is an award-winning political columnist, writer, author and stand-up comedian. He is a Middle East analyst for Creators Syndicate; his column appears in the Arlington Heights Daily Herald, Newsday and the Orlando Sentinel. He's also a regional columnist for the Southwest News-Herald in Chicago. Hanania's humor columns are archived in the book Slice of Life. His efforts to define the moderate Arab voice are detailed in the book The Moral Jihad.
Eric Umansky writes Today's Papers for Slate. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, New Republic and other publications. Earlier, he was an editor-type at Mother Jones as well as at the now-defunct Brill's Content.
Maggie Balough Hillery is an adjunct professor of journalism in the School of Journalism at Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis. She also is the faculty adviser to the student media organization, which includes print, Web and radio publishing. She is a former magazine and newspaper editor and project manager over the development of Web-based businesses. Hillery is a former president of the Society of Newspaper Design and has been a frequent judge of design and photography competitions.
Jim Jennings is editor in chief of the Toronto Sun. He is a past president of The Society for News Design. Prior to joining the Sun, he was a Lexington, Kentucky-based editorial consultant specializing in editorial content, newsroom management and readership issues. He has worked as a corporate vice president for news, editorial director, assistant managing editor, design director, graphics editor, news designer and staff photographer.
Bruce Ramsay joined Newsweek in 1997 as director of covers. Prior to joining Newsweek, Ramsay was art director at Spin, Lear's and Saturday Night magazines. His career includes creating the design of a pictorial newsweekly for Murdoch Magazine Development and serving as assistant art director at Esquire. He designed The Art of Fashion Photography for Aperture and Naomi Campbell's book, Naomi and Hardcore Rap, for Universe/Rizzoli. Ramsay teaches courses on magazine design and portfolio presentation at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Lucie Lacava is design consultant and president of Lacava Design Inc. in Montreal. She first made her mark with the redesign of Le Devoir, a Montreal daily that has gone on to win highest honors in international design competitions. Since then, she has redesigned more than 50 publications across North America and Europe. Her architectural approach to design and streamlined use of typography has translated into 100 national and international prestigious awards, including a Best of Show from the Society for News Design. She is a past president of that organization.
Tim Leong is assistant art director at Men's Health, overseeing the 20-page Malegrams Department. Earlier, he served arts internships at Men's Health, In Style and St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles, and was art director at Voxmagazine, a weekly tabloid in Columbia, Mo. Leong led the publication to several national design awards and was named the College Designer of the Year by the Student Society for News Design.
Tony Sutton is a newspaper design consultant based in Georgetown, Ontario, Canada. He is currently working with newspapers in Ireland, Poland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. A former editor of the Society for News Design's magazine Design, he has been a newspaper and magazine editor and designer in Britain, South Africa and Canada. The author of Creative Newspaper Design and Creative Magazine Design, Sutton also edits the political and literary Web site ColdType.net.
First Round
Amy Argetsinger is a staff writer for The Washington Post, where she has covered a variety of beats, including higher education. She is currently covering the West Coast as the Post's Los Angeles bureau chief. Her story on a young Masai woman seeking an education at an American college was a finalist for the 2004 American Society of Newspaper Editors awards. She also freelanced a few pieces for Washington City Paper in the early 1990s.
Joshua Benton is a staff writer for The Dallas Morning News. Before that, he worked as a projects reporter and rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He is a past finalist for the Livingston Award and a four-time Pulitzer nominee. His work overseas has included stories from Zambia (on a Pew Fellowship), Northern Ireland, Pitcairn Island, Japan, and Germany. He is a graduate of Yale University and a native of small-town south Louisiana.
Joel Elliott concluded a two-and-a-half-year stint at The Toccoa (Ga.) Record and then moved on to an internship on Capitol Hill, taking with him a stack of awards for hard news and investigative reporting. He received the national 2004 Payne Ethics Award for his student newspaper reporting on the inflated résumé of the president of Toccoa Falls College. Elliott persisted in the face of much opposition from faculty and fellow students, and the president resigned.
Challen Stephens is education issues reporter for The Huntsville Times in Alabama. He has been covering education for the last nine years. In 2004 he earned a national first-place award from the Education Writers Association for a four-day series that examined regional resegregation and detailed the effects of growing racial isolation inside the Huntsville City Schools system. In 2003 Stephens earned the Alabama AP Freedom of Information Award for school board reporting that enabled the Times to pursue successfully a lawsuit that ended certain private deliberations by Alabama's elected bodies.
Final Round
Stephanie Banchero is a staff reporter covering education for the Chicago Tribune. Her topics including student testing, teacher qualifications, the academic achievement gap between low-income students and their more affluent counterparts, and the impact of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. For 10 months, Banchero and a Tribune photographer documented the challenges facing a 9-year-old girl as she transferred from a failing school to a passing school under the act. For her work on this project, Banchero received a first-place award in 2005 from the national Education Writers Association. Before joining the Tribune in 1997, she was a reporter at such papers as the Charlotte Observer, Philadelphia Inquirer and the Salt Lake Tribune.
Phil Semas is editor in chief of The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. He oversees all editorial and business operations of the company, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and their Web sites, and Arts & Letters Daily. He is also the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and was the founding editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. He began reporting at the former publication in 1969.
Jodi Wilgoren is the Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, leading the newspaper's news and feature coverage of 11 Midwestern states. She spent 15 months covering the 2004 presidential campaign, following Howard Dean through the Democratic primaries and then John Kerry, the party's nominee. Previously, Wilgoren was a national education reporter based in the paper's New York headquarters and worked on its Metro staff.
First Round
John Breneman is an online editor who writes a humor blog at BostonHerald.com. Before joining the online paper, he had worked in journalism for 20 years, then took a year-long sabbatical to run the online site Humor Gazette.
John Burks is chair of the Department of Journalism at San Francisco State University, where he has taught magazine writing and coordinated the magazine sequence for the past 20 years. Previously, he was managing editor at Rolling Stone, a correspondent for Newsweek, editor in chief of San Francisco Focus, City and The City magazines, and a longtime magazine consultant. His books include Vans and Working Fire. Burks coauthored Groupies: A Rolling Stone Report and Let It Bleed: Rolling Stones at Altamont, which is based on the Rolling Stone story that won a National Magazine award for investigative reporting.
John Cloud has written cover stories for Time on topics ranging from troubled kids to end-of-life health care to Howard Dean since he joined the magazine in 1997. His work has been recognized by the National Headliner Awards, the Education Writers Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC. Cloud attended Harvard and also attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to Time, he was a senior writer at Washington City Paper for two years. He lives in New York City with his partner, Michael Feder.
Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He was formerly a senior writer at Boston Magazine and staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has written for a number of magazines including Spin, Out, Salon and JANE. He has taught magazine and nonfiction writing at Tufts, Emerson College, and Northeastern University. In 2004 Denizet-Lewis was the recipient of an Alicia Patterson Fellowship. He is a winner of the Excellence in Journalism Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and the Maggie Award for magazine writing, and he is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
Katharine Goodloe is a staff writer in the features department of The Dallas Morning News. She worked in the News' Washington bureau during the 2004 elections and previously worked at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Bill Kauffman is the author of five books, most recently Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive (Henry Holt/Picador). He lives in Genesee County in New York State.
Jim Stasiowski is an independent writing coach from Baltimore, Md. He has been a writer and reporter for The Breeze in Cape Coral, Fla., and The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash. He has coached reporters at newspapers and magazines in dozens of states and has spoken to groups of writers and editors at journalism conferences around the country, including the 2005 AAN East conference. Stasiowski writes a monthly coaching column that appears in more than two dozen newspaper-association publications.
Joe Strupp is an associate editor at Editor & Publisher, where he covers general assignment stories on everything from foreign news to features, profiles, journalism issues and business. Before joining E&P in 1999, Strupp worked at several newspapers including the Daily Journal, The Argus, S.F. Independent and the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif.
Amy Whitesall spent 10 years as a sportswriter before joining the Ann Arbor (Mich.) News features department in 2001. Her work has won awards from the Associated Press Sports Editors and the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. Whitesall lives with her husband and two children in Chelsea, Mich., and particularly enjoys writing in-depth profiles that her editor jokingly refers to as "brain probes."
Yumi Wilson is an assistant professor in journalism at San Francisco State University. Before becoming a professor in January, Wilson spent 11 years at the San Francisco Chronicle where she held various titles, including deputy readers' representative, Open Forum editor and city hall reporter. She graduated from the University of Southern California in 1990.
Bill Wyman is an assistant managing editor of National Public Radio, overseeing the network's arts programming. He was a longtime staff writer at the Chicago Reader, where he wrote the pop music column Hitsville. Wyman also co-hosted a popular and award-winning commercial radio show in Chicago, Sound Opinions. He has been arts editor of SF Weekly; an editor at Slate.com; a features editor and then arts and entertainment editor of Salon.com; and arts editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Kim Zetter is a senior reporter with Wired News in San Francisco, covering privacy, security, public policy and cyber terrorism. Prior to this, she was a features editor for PC World magazine. Her freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Detroit Free Press, Fast Business, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age (in Melbourne, Australia), Jerusalem Post, Wine & Gourmet and other publications. She is the author of two books: Simple Kabbalah and Out-to-Eat: San Francisco (a restaurant guide for Lonely Planet).
Final Round
Eric Adler is a senior features reporter at The Kansas City Star. In 2004 he won the Paul L. Myhre Single Story award in the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards competition for his story "The good day: An Alzheimer's love story."
Susanne Althoff edits features and other articles for the weekly Boston Globe Magazine. A resident of Somerville, Mass., she worked as an editor at city, regional, health and boating magazines for more than 10 years, and holds a master's degree from Columbia University's journalism school.
Rachel Sobel is a medical student at the University of California at San Francisco. She writes the Letter from Medical School column for U.S. News & World Report. Previously, she was an associate editor on the news magazine's science and medical staff and an editorial intern at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her freelance writing has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Washington City Paper, National Wildlife and Reader's Digest.
First Round
William Daley is the food and wine writer for the Chicago Tribune. Previously, he was a restaurant reviewer and food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and a restaurant reviewer and food writer for the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. He is a past president of the Association of Food Journalists.
Mollie Katzen enjoys a coveted position on the New York Times list of the 10 best-selling cookbook authors of all time. She is widely credited with moving healthful cooking from the fringes of American society squarely onto mainstream dinner tables. Her books include the classic Moosewood Cookbook, first published in 1972; The Enchanted Broccoli Forest; Still Life With Menu; and Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven.
Dave Scantland is editorial director of The Daily Gullet, a Webzine for hard-core food enthusiasts, as well as a manager and director for the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters. He makes a living as creative director for a high-tech firm in Atlanta, Ga.
Steven Shaw is a James Beard Award-winning food writer living in New York. In addition to writing online for sites like eGullet.com (where he is director and cofounder), Fat-Guy.com, Salon.com, NYMetro.com and CitySearch.com, he covers the food beat for Elle and has written for Saveur, Food & Wine, The New York Times, Commentary and others. Shaw has appeared on radio and television the world over.
Final Round
Sally Bernstein is the manager and editor in chief of Sally's Place (www.sallys-place.com), a Web site for food, beverage and travel enthusiasts. She manages and co-hosts Sally's Place Internet Radio Network, which has programming on wine and food. She's a charter member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and has served on the board of directors of the San Francisco Food Bank. Bernstein lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, for which he writes regularly about food. He is the recipient of three James Beard journalism awards.
Gerald Marzorati is the editor of The New York Times Magazine, where he is credited with revamping the food section, among other changes. He began his career at the SoHo News, a lower Manhattan alternative weekly, in the late 1970s. He worked as an editor at Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker before joining the staff of The New York Times in 1994. Over the years he has also written about popular music for Slate, Artforum, The Times Magazine and other publications. Marzorati is the author of A Painter of Darkness (Viking, 1989), about the artist Leon Golub, which won a PEN award for a first book of nonfiction. He lives with his wife and two sons in Westchester County.
Kelly Frankeny has more than 20 years' experience directing and working in newspaper and magazine visual departments and in media design. She is now creative director of Garcia Media in New York. She has taught publication design in Europe and the United States and has consulted in Latin America based out of Mexico City. Her design and visual direction have won numerous awards, and she has conducted training and seminars in Europe, Latin America and the United States. Previously, Frankeny was an assistant managing editor for design for the San Francisco Examiner; a cofounder and chief creative officer for duJour Media Inc. in San Francisco; and an assistant art director for the Dallas Times Herald. She has redesigned many papers. She also served on the board of directors for the Society for News Design for eight years.
Anita Kunz has produced cover art for many magazines including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. She has also illustrated more than 50 book jacket covers. Kunz teaches workshops and lectures at universities and institutions nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian and the Corcoran in Washington D.C. She has been honored with many prestigious awards and medals, and her critically acclaimed paintings and sculptures have appeared in galleries worldwide. Several of her Time magazine cover paintings are in the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and a collection of her works was exhibited at the Library of Congress in 2003. Kunz is current chair for the Society of Illustrators Museum of American Illustration annual exhibit. The National Post newspaper recently named her one of the 50 most influential women in Canada.
Phil Nesbitt is an independent design consultant who works on behalf of the American Press Institute, where he was an associate director from 1997-2000. He is a former president of the Society for News Design. Earlier in his career, he was assistant managing editor at The Record in Hackensack, N.J.; managing editor of news systems and graphics at the Singapore Monitor; and assistant managing editor of photography and graphics at the Chicago Sun-Times.
First Round
Jill Landes is a producer for 60 Minutes II. She has been at CBS News for more than 20 years. She started as a documentary producer for the radio division of CBS News before working as a planning producer for a variety of prime-time newsmagazines, including Street Stories, America Tonight and Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. Her radio documentaries received a number of awards, including a Peabody and a Columbia-duPont. Landes won two Emmy Awards for her work at 60 Minutes II.
Ray Locker has run the Sacramento bureau of The Associated Press for the last four years. During that time, he's overseen the news service's coverage of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 2003 recall election and the state's energy crisis. Before joining AP, he was a reporter and editor at The Tampa Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
William Marsden is a journalist, author and documentary maker living in Montreal, Canada. He is a senior reporter at the Montreal Gazette, where he is a two-time winner of Canada's top journalism award. His latest book, The Road to Hell: How Biker Gangs Are Conquering Canada, won the Arthur Ellis Award for best crime nonfiction. He is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington D.C. His most recent project for the center, "The Water Barons: How Five Companies Tried to Take Control of the World's Drinking Water," won the Investigative Reporters and Editors award for best online investigative project.
Miguel Sancho produces investigative reports for the CBS News program 48 Hours, specializing in hidden camera/undercover work. His stories have won many awards, including the George Polk Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the Overseas Press Club Award and the Deadliner Club Award. Sancho has worked overseas in Russia, the United Kingdom and several Latin American countries.
Final Round
Monika Bauerlein is senior editor at Mother Jones magazine. Previously, she was interim editor, managing editor and staff writer for City Pages (Twin Cities).
Nick Fielding is a senior reporter with The Sunday Times in London, where he specializes in covering stories on terrorism and intelligence issues. He is coauthor of Masterminds of Terror, an account of the plotting of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fielding also coauthored Defending the Realm, an investigation into the British intelligence service.
Mark Katches oversees investigations for The Orange County Register. He has directed two Pulitzer finalists since 2004--including a public service finalist that exposed the dangers of Mexican candy. Earlier, Katches was a lead reporter on "The Body Brokers," a series detailing the rising profits from donated human tissue. The stories, which appeared in the Register in 2000, won the Gerald Loeb Award and top national honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors and Sigma Delta Chi. Katches also oversees state and county coverage at the Register. He is on the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors.
First Round
Jim DeRogatis is the pop music critic at The Chicago Sun-Times; the co-host of Sound Opinions, the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show; the author of several books about music, including Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic; and the coeditor, with his wife, Carmél Carrillo, of Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics.
Josh Freedom du Lac is the broadcasting columnist at The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee. He previously served as the paper's pop culture writer and, before that, its pop music critic. He wrote about the latter topic for various music magazines and was editor of the hip-hop reference book MusicHound R&B: The Essential Album Guide. His profile on celebrity chef Mario Batali was a finalist for the 2000 Livingston Awards.
Michael Goldberg is the cofounder and editor in chief of the online pop culture magazine Neumu (neumu.net). In 1994 he founded the first online multi-media music magazine, Addicted to Noise. From 1997 to 2000, he was a senior vice president and editor in chief of SonicNet, where he initiated and oversaw the yearlong investigation that resulted in the series "Playing With Fire: The Untold Story of Woodstock 99." That series won a Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for Web reporting in 2001. Goldberg's writing has appeared in Wired, Esquire, Vibe, Details and numerous other publications.
Agustin Gurza is a staff writer for the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times, covering Latino arts and entertainment. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where as a student journalist he won a citation in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Before joining The Times as a Metro columnist in 1999, Gurza worked in various reporting posts for the Orange County Register and the Riverside Press Enterprise, where he won first place for immigration coverage in the Best of the West competition.
Final Round
Lorraine Ali is a senior writer at Newsweek, covering music and pop culture trends. She is based in Los Angeles. Ali won an Excellence in Journalism Award in 2002 from the National Arab Journalists Association and was listed in Da CapoBest Music Writing 2001 for her story "West Bank Hard Core." She was voted 1997's Music Journalist of the Year. Before joining Newsweek, Ali was a senior critic for Rolling Stone; a music columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Mademoiselle; and a regular contributor to GQ.
Walter Kolosky writes for Allaboutjazz.com and Jazz Improv magazine. He is the author of the book Girls Don't Like Real Jazz--A Jazz Patriot Speaks Out.
Simon Warner is a senior teaching fellow at the School of Music of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom and the director of PopuLUs, the university's Centre for the Study of the World's Popular Musics. He is editor of Chapter&Verse, a Web journal of popular music and literature studies, and he writes the column Anglo Visions for Pop Matters (popmatters.com), an international magazine of cultural criticism. Warner has been a rock reviewer with The Guardian in London. His writings include the book Rockspeak!: The Language of Rock and Pop and a chapter in the 2004 volume Remembering Woodstock.
First Round
Bryan Keefer is assistant managing editor of CJRDaily.org, part of the Columbia Journalism Review. He is coauthor of The New York Times bestseller All the President's Spin, and was one of the editors of the award-winning Web site Spinsanity.com.
Harry Mok is Web producer for ContraCostaTimes.com in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a master's in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle; Salon.com; Hyphen magazine, where he is a contributing editor; and other publications. Before joining ContraCostaTimes.com this year, Mok was a copy editor for the Chronicle and online editor for ChannelA.com, an Asian and Asian-American Web site. He has also worked for Newsday in New York, the San Francisco Examiner and the Associated Press.
Suzanne Perry is a senior reporter at The Chronicle of Philanthropy in Washington, D.C. From 1990 to 1999, she worked as a reporter for Reuters News Service in Brussels, Belgium. Earlier in her career, she was a reporter at the Minneapolis Star, the Duluth Herald and the DuluthNews-Tribune. She has also been communications director for Minnesota Public Radio and communications manager for the American Refugee Committee.
David Whelan is a staff writer at Forbes, based in its Silicon Valley bureau. He writes about technology and philanthropy. Prior to joining Forbes in 2004, Whelan was the small-business beat writer for the San Francisco Bay Area Contra Costa Times, where he also covered the recall campaign that made Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. Earlier, he worked at TheChronicle of Philanthropy, Inside.com/Inside Magazine and American Demographics, and was an analyst with First Manhattan Consulting Group. Whelan earned a degree in economics from Harvard University. He has been a National Press Foundation fellow and was part of a Contra Costa Times reporting team that won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for breaking news coverage.
Final Round
Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time and is currently writing a book on Haiti. In April he was a featured speaker on Pakistan at the Royal Geographical Society of London. He was cofounder, CEO and editor in chief of BlueEar.com, a global periodical published online from 1999 to 2005. He lives in Alexandria, Va.
Dan Froomkin is a consultant and freelancer who writes the White House Briefing column for The Washington Post. Previously, he was an editor, metro editor and senior producer of the Politics section at washingtonpost.com. He has been a reporter at the Orange County Register, The Miami Herald, the Winston-Salem Journal and the National Journal.
Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of New West, a new online magazine about the Rocky Mountain West. He was previously the cofounder and editor in chief of The Industry Standard, the award-winning weekly news magazine that chronicled the rise and fall of the Internet economy. Weber also served eight years as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, and before that helped launch the Geneva-based international affairs magazine World Link. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and lives in Missoula, Mont., with his wife, Karen, and three stepchildren.
Tracy Collins is the deputy managing editor for visuals and the news desk at The Arizona Republic.
Gary Fabiano has traveled all over the world in his work as a documentary photojournalist. He has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and the Middle East. His photos documenting the attack on the World Trade Center as it was unfolding have appeared in several exhibitions and books including Here Is New York. After Fabiano won the 2000 Alfred Eisenstadt Awards, he and his photographs were featured in the "Best Magazine Photos of the Year" special edition of Life magazine. Now based in Washington, D.C., he is represented by SIPA Press.
Stephanie Grace Lim is a photographer, illustrator and designer at the San Jose Mercury News. She has won acclaim from the National Press Photographers Association, Associated Press, Society for News Design, National Headliners and Nikon. She was named Michigan College Photographer of the Year. Her work has been featured in Life, People, Billboard, Photographer's Forum and Print magazine. Lim, who is a toy collector, previously worked at TheCharlotte Observer, Ann Arbor News and the University of Michigan.
First Round
Holly Andren is the special sections editor for Mpls.St.PaulMagazine. She researches, writes and edits content about health care, education, homebuilding, interior design, landscaping, sports and recreation, charities, and weddings and celebrations. She has been an editor with the magazine for four years and has also edited publications within her company's Custom division. In addition, Andren appears regularly on WCCO Radio's Parade of Homes Radio Hour.
Melissa Pasanen is an award-winning features journalist with specialties in food and farming. Her work appears regularly in regional and national publications including the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, Art of Eating and Vermont Life. She has also written for Seven Days, Salon and Eating Well magazine, and was named a 2002 National Press Foundation fellow in food journalism. She lives in northwestern Vermont.
Amy Souza is the associate editor of Weatherwise magazine and a freelance writer and editor. As a freelancer she has written for Pittsburgh's Pulp, Vermont's Seven Days and numerous other publications. Souza lives in Virginia.
Paul Stroede landed in the newsweekly biz in 1989, when he took a job at Isthmus in Madison, Wis. Between becoming art director in 1991 and his escape in 2001, he earned his master of fine arts and was deeply involved in the agony of two redesigns. During that time, he also received numerous Milwaukee Press Club awards for design excellence. Most recently, he received the Print Magazine Certificate of Excellence for his freelance illustration work. Still living in the city that publishes his favorite newspaper, Stroede now puts beer on the table as an illustrator/designer/painter/consultant and part-time dog-walker.
Final Round
David Carson and his work have been featured in more than 180 magazines and newspapers around the world, including a front-page article in The New York Times. His work has received many accolades. London-based Creative Review magazine dubbed Carson "Art Director of the Era," and a feature in Newsweek magazine said Carson "changed the public face of graphic design." The graphic design publication Emigre devoted an entire issue to Carson, the only American designer to be so honored in the magazine's history. Carson's first book, with Lewis Blackwell, The End of Print, is the top-selling graphic design book of all time. His work continues to be subjective and largely driven by intuition, with an emphasis on reading material before designing it and experimenting with ways to communicate in a variety of mediums. He remains a hands-on designer, keeping his studio small and mobile. Examples of Carson's work can be found online at www.davidcarsondesign.com.
Carol Goodhue was special sections editor at the San Diego Union-Tribune before taking on her current job as the paper's training and development coordinator. She held editing jobs at The San Jose Mercury News and The Argus in Fremont, Calif., where she began her career as a feature writer. Between earning a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a master's from the University of California at Berkeley, Goodhue taught English with the Peace Corps in Libya and Tunisia.
Hugh Hart , a musician and pop culture writer, started his freelance career at the Chicago Reader where he reported on the city's theater and alternative music scenes. He then wrote about local eccentrics in his Chicago Tribune Hanging Out column. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1999, Hart has covered architecture, theater, film, television and visual arts for the Los Angeles Times; television for The New York Times; movies for The Boston Globe, Denver Post and Philadelphia Inquirer; Internet for Entertainment Weekly; and design for I.D. and Print magazines. He also writes a weekly movie column for the San Francisco Chronicle.
