For the 14 or so years of its life, The Coast has done a predictable dance with the Atlantic Journalism Awards. The steps of this dance are simple. 1) We submit a bunch of stories to the awards. 2) We get completely shut out of the nominations. 3) We get pissed off and complain that the people behind the awards can't recognize some of the best stuff being published on the east coast. 4) We boycott the next year's awards and don't submit anything. 5) A year after that we've cooled off enough to try again. 6) Start again at 1). This is one of the years where we aren't too pissed off to participate, so in January we sent in a bunch of stories. But the dance has already gone differently. Instead of getting zero nominations, it was just announced that we got three. Yes, you read that right. A whopping THREE!
Stephen Kimber's investigation into a local heart researcher getting bullied by the old boys' network at the hospital has been nominated in the Enterprise Reporting category. Lezlie Lowe's three-part series on living with HIV/AIDS has been nominated in the Feature Writing category. And Robert Plowman's cover story about living without the internet for a month has also been nominated for Feature Writing.
This is already unprecedented recognition from the AJAs, and I congratulate Kimber, Lowe and Plowman. Now I understand why people at the Oscars say it's an honour just to be nominated — because it is. But I'll keep my fingers crossed for some familiar names in the envelope when the prizes are handed out May 12.
By the way, there's some talk of all the print, radio and TV journalism nominated in the 25 categories being available at some point on the AJA site, but I don't see it yet, so I'll put links to the three Coast stories below. And for a complete list of nominess, click here.
Stephen Kimber's "The trials of Dr. Horne"
Lezlie Lowe's "Living positive" series: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Robert Plowman's "I was an internet addict"
