Following are PDFs or links to the winning columns of the six 2012 first-place winners in the annual contest of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Each entrant was required to submit three columns originally published in 2011.
Category A. General Interest (print) over 50,000 circulation — Gendy Alimurung, LA Weekly. The headlines in this PDF entry are: “Parents, Be Very Nervous: Parties for teen girls are all the (expensive) rage,” “Coming (Back) to America: In Long Beach, combat veterans learn to get moving again” and “Interview with a Corpse: There are 8 million crime dramas in the naked city. Somebody’s gotta play dead.”
Category B. Humor (print) over 50,000 circulation — Samantha Bennett, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The linked headlines are: “iPhone, you phone, we all phone,” “Fall is near, all six tons of it” and “Halloween: Not just for kids anymore.”
C. General Interest (print) under 50,000 circulation — Eve Samples, The Stuart (Fla) News. The linked headlines are: “On Memorial Day, remembering a man I never knew,” “Octogenarians fighting to keep cat held in contempt of court, required to pay $12,000 in legal costs” and “Does Gov. Scott take credit for 600 jobs in Martin County? Bet on it.”
D. Humor (print) under 50,000 circulation — Laura Rafaty, St. Helena (Calif.) Star. The headlines in this PDF entry are: “Up The Valley: Far Out,” “Up The Valley: I Like Mike” and “Up The Valley: Most Alarming.”
E. Online, Blog and Multimedia columns with over 100,000 monthly unique visitors — John Avlon, The Daily Beast. The headlines in this PDF entry are: “Tea Party for the Left?” “Southern Sudan’s Historic Indepence Referendum” and “Vaclav Havel’s Heroic Politics of Truth and Responsibility.”
F. Online, Blog and Multimedia under 100,000 monthly unique visitors — Mike Farley, Farley in Writing. The linked headlines are: “A Conversation Between Husband and Wife,” “The Braidy Crunch” and “O (no), Christmas Tree.”
A list of all finalists, including the comments made by judges, can be found on this post.
