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The Washington Examiner is shutting down its local operation this week, but Examiner transportation reporter Liz Essley’s week isn’t all about bad news.

Essley took the top prize in Tuesday’s “Dateline Awards” competition of the DC chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The reporter was awarded the Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award, which includes a $1,000 check, for her series of stories on the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority.

Dozens of other reporters also received awards during the ceremony, which was during the SPJ’s annual Hall of Fame induction dinner. More Examiner reporters were on the list of award winners, including Steve Contoro and Mark Flatten, along with finalists Rick Snider and Kytja Weir.

A complete list of winners can be found here.

Where in the world is WaPo’s Gene Weingarten? The “humorist” took a week off from his weekly column, so we have been given a “Best Of” from Gene. While, that might seem like an oxymoron, this week’s column is actually quite good.  Plus, it tackles one of our favorite topics: big butts.

The column originally ran in 2006 and it chronicles a curious trip that Gene took to New York to meet with a plastic surgeon. According to Gene, he saw an ad for buttock enlargements, so he lined up an interview with Dr. George Lefkovits, the man who makes big booty dreams come true. Sorry, I shouldn’t be so crass. The doctor told Gene that he tries to “augment and re-profile buttocks”

How does a doctor make the bottom bigger and how is Gene’s derriere doing? Read more

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Hollywood Has a Gay Sex Problem… When Mother Jones’ movie guy Asawin Suebsaeng penned a review of Steven Soderbergh‘s latest (and maybe last) film Behind the Candelabra, he highlighted Soderbergh’s claim that the movie never made it into theaters because of all the gay sex. A few Hollywood executives pushed back and said Soderbergh’s claim wasn’t true. Then, Soderbergh got in touch with MoJo himself. “In Soderbergh’s view, the reason you can’t see Behind the Candelabra in American theaters has as much to do with financially—though not politically—conservative executives as it does with the palate of the American movie-going public. ‘It’s all economics,’ he says.”

Women like sex, too… Salon has a piece by Tracy Clark-Flory on a new book from Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. Flory says Bergner, who talked with a lot of expert sex researchers to get to the bottom of what women really want, has come to a surprising conclusion: “…women’s sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it’s so often made out to be — that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we’ve told ourselves about male sexuality.”

Summer Swimming Safety… After recounting a dramatic story of a life guard who spotted a drowning kid from 50 feet away when his father couldn’t at 10, Slate’s Mario Vittone  has tips on what to really look for, especially if you plan to spend any time near the water this summer. ”Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life,” he writes.

Happy Birthday Bazooka Joe… WaPo’s Style blog highlights a new, compact anthology of 200 “classic” Bazooka Joe comics, called “Bazooka Joe and His Gang” published to celebrate Joe’s 60th birthday. “The book is full of curious details about the gum and the times. Did you know, for instance, that Joe’s eye-patch was a spoof on a Hathaway shirt ad?” No, we did not. And, as writer Ron Charles tells us, this collection is particularly poignant as Joe and his gang’s stale humor will soon disappear from gum packages forever, and replaced next year with brain teasers.

WaPo is gearing up to debut its paywall. The publication announced today that its metered subscription model will be phased in over several weeks beginning on June 12. They plan to implement the meter to “random selections of readers” to achieve “the best possible experience.”

From the sounds of it, they’re counting on readers to digest a hell of a lot of stories.

As explained in the release, the metered model will initially require… Read more

The long goodbye is over. Come next week, one of Washington’s “gossip” columns, “Yeas & Nays,” will be no more. The Sound of Music soundtrack — a song sung by the Von Trap children — comes to mind. We’ve had a little bit to say about Yeas & Nays in the last few years — good, bad and everything in between. We’re sure (wink wink) that WaPo‘s “The Unreliable Source” can absorb anything that might get lost in the void.

We wish the writers the best in their transitions to new jobs. In the meantime, Washington Examiner wants to offer you something new — a Politics Today newsletter.

A note from Editor Stephen Smith… Read more

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