Category Archives: In the news

Congratulations to MOBster Amanda Shaw Newsome, who picked up a couple of Emmys for a doc for Alabama Public Television.

APT Earns Four Emmy Awards

June 26, 2007 – Alabama Public Television has received four Southeastern Regional Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for documentaries produced on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and on contemporary Alabama artist Thornton Dial.

Earning awards for excellence in Documentary Production was “Justice Without Violence,” a 30-minute documentary on the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 -1956, produced and directed by APT Executive Producer Amanda Shaw Newsome. Newsome also earned an Emmy for her script for the film.

Interns Lose Slots at Gannett Paper

The Gannett Co. newspaper in Montgomery, Ala., was forced to make quick and drastic budget cuts last week, editor Wanda Lloyd told Journal-isms on Monday, leaving three interns suddenly without summer jobs. Similar cuts could be coming at other Gannett properties.

The displaced interns were instantly picked up by Schurz Communications, a South Bend, Ind., media company that owns 15 dailies and five weeklies. Charles V. Pittman, the company’s senior vice president-newspapers, had just addressed the interns Friday at the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute in Nashville, and said he could not let “these young people have their internship pulled out from under them.”

The three students will be going to the Herald Times in Bloomington, Ind. Schurz is taking a total of 13 interns, all of them trained in a joint multimedia program of Black College Wire and the Diversity Institute.

“I would not have done this if I had any other choice,” Lloyd, editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, told Journal-isms. She said that after a recent meeting of Gannett publishers, she was told by her publisher, Scott Brown, that the newspaper would be asked to take a look at possible cuts for the rest of 2007. She was on vacation last week attending a high-school reunion.

WBHM (90.3 FM) picked up a slew of Alabama Associated Press Broadcasters’ Association awards and Radio and Television News Directors’ Association Edward R. Murrow awards in the radio category recently, while ABC 33/40, Fox 6 and NBC 13 also picked up trophies in the TV category of both contests.

• WBHM’s awards page, with links to the reporters and stories
• Full list of winners in AP contest
• Full list of RTNDA awards (region 9)

As reported by The Birmingham News:

Brett J. Blackledge of The Birmingham News was awarded The Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting today.

Blackledge received the honor, the highest in American journalism, for his 14-month investigation of Alabama’s two-year college system, in which he reported corruption, cronyism and nepotism on a wide scale.

“What’s remarkable about this award is it basically affirms what we do every day,” Blackledge said. “There’s nothing magical about this. It’s 98 percent of the stuff we do every day. It’s extraordinary, yet very ordinary.”

You can find a selection of the articles that got Brett this huge honor here

Congratulations to the new officers at the Birmingham Association of Black Journalists …

• President: Eddie Lard, Editorial Writer, The Birmingham News
• Vice President-Broadcast: Steve Crocker, Anchor, Fox 6
• Vice President-Print: Charles McCauley, Assistant Business Editor, The Birmingham News
• Secretary: Charla Draper, Associate Foods Editor, Southern Living
• Treasurer: Kathy Times, Investigative Reporter, NBC 13
• Deputy Treasurer: Willie Chriesman, Chriesman & Associates
• Parliamentarian: Allison Barnes, Assistant Features Editor, Southern Living

(Full story in the Birmingham Times.)