Alaska Business Earns Press Club Awards for Cover Design, Feature Writing

Placing second to Longbrake’s art in the Best Magazine Cover category was the April 2024 issue of Alaska Business. With a red plaid design, Art Director Monica Sterchi-Lowman emulates an archetypal cookbook for the theme “The Care and Feeding of Alaska’s Workforce.” In third place, the Alaska Press Club honored UAA’s The Northern Light for the cover of its Fall Commencement Edition 2024.

Alaska Business also swept the top two spots in the Best Magazine Feature category. In first place, “The Community Winter Access Trail” by Nancy Erickson from the May 2024 issue earned praise from the category judge for its “strong lead and ending, with rich reported detail in between.” The article tells the story of the ice road that connects North Slope villages to the end of the Dalton Highway at Deadhorse.

Rindi White’s report on technological advances in Alaska agriculture, “Wired Cattle” from September 2024, placed second. Rounding out the category, High Country News, a Colorado-based magazine covering the Western United States, earned third place for an Alaska-related report, “An Alaska Native Mutual Aid Network Tackles the Climate Crisis.”

Another writing prize went to Vanessa Orr for the May 2024 article “Alaska Music Census: The Bottom Line of Show Business.” The category judge, journalist Laura Tillman, commented that the report “helped me understand a scene I had no concept of before.” Orr earned second place for Best Arts Reporting; the top prize went to the Homer News article “Homer Theatre under new ownership.”

A sister publication, edited by White, also earned favor from the Alaska Press Club. James Brown, designer of the quarterly The Alaska Contractor, won first and third place for Best Layout and Design for, respectively, the Annual Report to Members (of the Associated General Contractors of Alaska) and the report Delivering the Future. In second place was The Northern Light’s design of the UAA 2024 presidential election poll.

An article in The Alaska Contractor earned second place in Best Education Reporting for Kevin Klott, author of “Teachers in the Field.” Another freelance contributor to The Alaska Contractor and Alaska Business, Dimitra Lavrakas, earned Alaska Press Club recognition, placing third in Best Profile for “Mr. Whitekeys’ New Act: A new act—sailing into history” published in The Senior Voice.