07.11.19

Those Championship
Seasons
YOU MIGHT SAY PW GOT BETTER WITH AGE
BY KEVIN UHRICH
Looking back during my time here, I tend to think of all the people I came to
know and love and the stories that we shared. So it seems natural that there
were no better times for me and many others over the past 20-plus years
than when we were producing simply terrific journalism — stories that could
have appeared in any magazine in the country, with many going on to win top
industry honors. So many awards from competing in national, state and regional
contests that memories of the few hard times there have been here truly are
fleeting by comparison.
Maybe that’s being too generous, because there have been more than a few
dark days, like when we had to report on the death of friends and colleagues, and
take salary cuts at the height of the Great Recession, reminding us this really is a
business.
But all that gloom seemed to fade away as we entered awards season at the
start of each year, confident in knowing that we were bound to win something for
all of our hard work the previous year.
GENERAL EXCELLENCE
It was more than likely that the initial intent of the founders of what we know
today as the Pasadena Weekly back in 1984 was not to go out and win awards for
their efforts.
But good things tend to happen when talented people get together for a righteous
common purpose, and in the case of PW, the plan was always to produce
the best community newspaper possible on a weekly basis.
To that end, this unanticipated byproduct of dedication to the basic directive
— winning awards — was achieved under no less than four separate sets of
owners.
For those outstanding efforts on the part of reporters, feature writers, illustrators,
photographers, graphic artists, as well as editors, publishers and advertising
folks, PW staffers have won dozens of first, second and third place plaques and
trophies, as well as numerous certificates of achievement, honorable mentions,
and other accolades from outside the profession.
From investigative reporting, news reporting, breaking news reporting, news
feature writing, entertainment writing, personality profiles, photography, graphic
arts and illustrations to classified and display advertising, it seems there was no
part of the paper that missed winning some type of award over the years from
the LA Press Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA) and
the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).
I know it is poor form to boast, but I can’t help but look back with pride over
the past two decades as editor, a period during which the PW won more awards
from more respected journalistic organizations than at any other time in the
modern-day paper’s 35 years in business.
With CNPA, we won a total of 20 top awards from 1984 to 2009, and another
five from 2010 to 2014, the year the paper dropped out of the Sacramento-based
organization due to financial constraints.
When it came to AAN, which we joined the year after Southland Publishing
bought the paper from the LA Times, beginning in 2004 we started winning
awards. Three years later, we won first and second place awards the same year,
2007, respectively, one for a somewhat critical story I had penned about Project
Censored, and the latter for a series
of stories former Deputy Editor
Joe Piasecki had written about the
plight of LA County foster kids aging
out of the system. In the end, we
would win a total
of seven AAN
awards before
dropping out of
that organization.
There were
two years that
stand out in
my mind, 2010
and 2011, not
so much for
the awards
that our writers and artists richly
deserved, but for the simply
outstanding journalism that
we produced from our South
DeLacey Avenue office in Old
Pasadena.
In 2010, they received top
CNPA honors for coverage of
the previous summer’s Station
Fire. In addition, the paper was
named as a blue-ribbon finalist
in the general excellence
category, as were an investigative report and a
breaking news story.
As we reported at the time, the paper received a first-place award among
weekly papers with circulations higher than 25,001 for the Sept. 3, 2009 story
“Fire on the Mountain,” detailing the devastation caused by the worst brushfire in
Los Angeles County history, written by then-City Hall Reporter André Coleman,
former Deputy Editor Jake Armstrong, as well as Joe, who by then had returned
to his alma mater USC to get his master’s degree and was a contributing editor on
the project.
In the general excellence category, judges recognized the paper’s Jan. 8, 15 and
22, 2009 editions for their “breadth of story selection and general news coverage.”
As our story points out, Armstrong’s investigative piece, “Just Too High,”
examined grossly disproportionate marijuana arrest rates in California and
Pasadena, where African Americans are three times more likely than whites to
be arrested for pot-related offenses. Piasecki wrote the story “Hater Nation,” another
Press Club favorite in 2010, after PW received a letter threatening President
Barack Obama.
“I’ve been blessed with some wonderful and talented people, not all of whom
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26 PASADENA WEEKLY | 07.11.19