Readers Win!

I spent last Saturday evening at the American Advertising Federation Tucson's 2010 ADDY Awards wingding. While most ceremonies like this are about as fun as a tax audit, I actually had a fine time.

I got to talk with all sorts of interesting people; I got to heckle my friend Dave Hatfield, the editor of our sister newspaper Inside Tucson Business, who deservedly received the Golden Pen Award; and when the publisher bought our table one bottle each of red and white wine, it turned out that I was the only red-wine drinker at the table.

Oh, and we won some awards, too—seven, to be exact, including two Gold Awards.

Regular readers of this space know that we don't place too much importance on awards here at Weekly World Central, considering the subjective and unreliable nature of many contests. However, it's undeniably interesting that the two Gold Awards we nabbed were largely due to, well, you, our readers.

We received top cover-design honors for the Obama Issue (Jan. 15, 2009). You may recall that for that issue, we invited readers to send us works of art and writing—positive, negative or somewhere in between—regarding the then-impending presidential inauguration.

And we nabbed top illustration honors for the "Jesus Jack" image on the cover of our Fiction 84 readers' short-story-contest issue (July 30, 2009).

While the artists behind those covers—Adam Kurtz and Gary Smathers—deserve credit for their fine work, we have to acknowledge that it was you, our readers, who came up with the material that led to both of these covers.

In these cases, I think the ADDYs judges got it right. So, readers: Congratulations on your hard-earned awards!