The Boston Phoenix is honored to have won three awards in the annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) contest. Altweekly Award winners were announced June 17 at AAN's annual convention, in San Diego, California, at a luncheon maliciously, deliciously, and irreverently presided over by syndicated alt-weekly sex columnist Dan Savage.

Long-time Phoenix contributor and noted attorney Harvey A. Silverglate (assisted by Carl Takei and Dan Poulson) took first place in the contest's Political Column category for a trio of civil-liberties based "Freedom Watch" columns - "The Criminal Justice System Messes Up" (dealing with false convictions), "Hiding the Gulag" (on the rights of enemy combatants), and "Street Artists Fight To Perform in Boston." As a first-place winner, Silverglate received a classy Lucite plaque as well as a cheesy engraved cheerleading statue.

Second-place honors for Media Reporting/Criticism went to Phoenix senior writer Dan Kennedy for three media-related features - "A Tale of Two Papers" (on the Globe/Herald rivalry), "Feed Your Head" (the rise of podcasting), and "Secret Agents" (on the practice of jailing reporters for not disclosing sources).

Freelance contributor Joyce Millman won a third-place Altweekly Award for Arts Criticism for her television reviews - "Prime Jane" (Prime Suspect 5), "Adventures in the Skin Trade" (Nip/Tuck), and "Smooth Operators" (UPN's Veronica Mars and Fox's House).

AAN is an association of more than 120 alternative weeklies throughout the US and Canada. Congratulations to Harvey, Dan, and Joyce; peer praise is high praise indeed.

Elsewhere on the praise-and-prize front, Boston University College of Communication students Dori Berman, Carrie Lock, Richard Rainey, and Lindsay Taub won first place in the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Mark of Excellence national awards for a collaborative piece published in the Boston Phoenix. The June 2004 feature, "Is Bernard Baran Guilty?", dealing with a gay man's possible false conviction for child molestation, was published as a joint effort of this paper and BU's graduate-seminar Investigative Journalism Project.

BY CLIF GARBODEN

June 24 - 30, 2005