Awards Mania

Two of the 20 finalists for the 2011 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists hail from local publications. Staff writer Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times is in the running, and Cindy Carcamo has been nominated for a piece that appeared in local literary journal Slake: Los Angeles. Carcamo is a reporter for the OC Register.

On the statewide front, Kelley Weiss and Ryan Gabrielson are both finalists for stories they did at nonprofit investigative reporting group California Watch.

Read more

In what ranks as an epic Tinseltown version of killing two birds with one stone, it was announced today that for the next 20 years, the Kodak Theatre will be known as the Dolby Theatre, with the venue’s gold-standard tenant faithfully returning each winter for the duration to throw the annual Academy Awards bash.

From the press release:

“Our ability to swiftly conclude two significant contracts with global entertainment leaders affirms Hollywood as a thriving district,” said Shaul Kuba, co-founder of CIM Group, owners of the Hollywood & Highland Center…

Read more

An article posted this week by Easy Reader News editor and publisher Kevin Cody perfectly encapsulates the Dickensian state of 21st century journalism.

On the best-of-times side, there’s the fact that Cody – who manages a 50,000-circulation print weekly as well as a respected companion website – recently got to spend time with former contributors who have gone on to Pulitzer Prize winning success. He partied in the Hollywood Hills with Wall Street Journal national news editor Sam Enriquez and had dinner in Redondo Beach with politico.com’s Matt Wuerker, who just won this year’s prize for editorial cartooning.

At the worst-of-times end of things, he had a long conversation at the first party with an LA Times employee about the newspaper’s paywall:

I assumed the Times web reporter would be happy at the prospect of people paying to read his stories, rather than reading them for free. He wasn’t. He thinks the paywall is a bad idea. Every morning, he reads Google News for free, so why would he or anyone else pay to read the Los Angeles Times online, he asked.

Read more

Before flying to Los Angeles this weekend with her partner and four children to attend the 2012 GLAAD Media Awards, Ohio mom Jennifer Tyrrell had never boarded a commercial airliner. Her appearance Saturday night at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel led to eight minutes of the best kind of teary awards speechifying – a dedicated mom thanking GLAAD for their support of her efforts to right a Boy Scouts of America wrong.

FishbowlLA’s favorite part the Tyrrell speech comes at around the seven-minute mark. That’s when she urged people in the audience to sign her change.org petition, which asks that she be reinstated as a Boy Scout den mother in Bridgeport:

“I’m going to ask each of you right now to take your phone, go to change.org/scouts. It will take you right to the petition. Go ahead, everyone. Take out your phone. It’s OK… Then share it with everyone you know. Together, we can make a difference.”

Read more

It’s a remarkable achievement for any journalist or newspaper organization to be named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. So congratulations are in order to the LA Times, despite the fact that the newspaper has just come up short in three separate 2011-year categories.

In Breaking News Photography, Carolyn Cole and Brian van der Brug lost out to the AFP’s Massoud Hassaini. His coverage of a suicide bombing in Kabul topped their chronicling of Japanese natural disasters. Meanwhile, in the realm of Feature Photography, Francine Orr’s look at autism lost out to Craig F. Walker’s look for the Denver Post at a discharged Iraq War veteran struggling with PST.

In the Commentary bracket, city columnist Steve Lopez’s touching reports about his dad’s dwindling health were a runner-up to Mary Schmich, who covers the Windy City in a similar capacity for sister newspaper the Chicago Tribune.

Read more

Los Angeles Times photographer Katie Falkenberg is the winner of the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Feature Photography thanks to her photo essay “A lasting toll.” The shrunken photo to the right is from her series. Better to click over and see the works in full.

Full list of Sigma Delta Chi winners after the jump.

Read more

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists announced the finalists for its annual awards yesterday. Among those honored: LA Weekly‘s Gendy Alimurung in the “General Interest (print) over 50,000 circulation” category. She’s up against Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe and Dave Lieber of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

For the second year in a row Roger Ebert is up for an award in the “Blog and Multimedia over 100,000 monthly unique visitors” category. He took the honor last year.

Winners will be announced May 5.

Full list of finalists after the jump:

Read more

University of Southern California student Eric Burse was named the 2012 National Association of Black Journalists Student of the Year and will be honored at NABJ’s 37th Annual Convention and Career Fair in New Orleans on June 23.

Burse is studying broadcast and digital journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism along with political science. He’s worked at the Daily Trojan as a photographer and entertainment reporter and at Annenberg’s TV station as a studio technician, assignment desk editor and on-air multimedia journalist.

“I am extremely honored to receive the NABJ Student Journalist of the Year recognition. This award means a great deal to me – far more than I can express. I share this award with other student journalists who are working just as hard as I am to achieve success in an industry we all look forward to joining,” Burse said in a statement. “I look forward to supporting NABJ just as much as the organization has supported me to through high school and college.”

Read more

With a pair of Pulitzers, a recent Frank McCulloch Courage in Journalism award and many other prizes, photographer Barbara Davison (pictured) remains one of the LA Times’ go-to chroniclers of world conflict. Which is why it’s so interesting to read how innocently her stellar career started.

In an interview with Ashley Hennefer of the Reno News & Review, Davison said her decision to become a photographer occurred several years before studies in Montreal at McGill and Concordia universities. Here’s how Davison answered the question, “How did you know you wanted to be a photojournalist:”

“It’s funny, people ask me that, and it’s weird. At the age of 15, I decided I was going to be a photographer. I don’t know why. Before I’d even taken a picture. And then ironically, the first photo I had ever taken with a roll of 35mm film was published in the student newspaper at the age of 18. So it was sort of destiny.”

Read more

The winners of the 2012 Peabody Awards were announced this morning, and the usual suspects cleaned up again this year. PBS, CNN and HBO all won three awards, while Showtime was among those to garner two. Stephen Colbert will undoubtedly be bragging tonight on his show, after picking up the Peabody for his various Super PAC segments. Portlandia also picked up a deserving nod for IFC.

Complete list of winners after jump:

Read more