Some news and notes ….

So it's Day 3 since my contract with my former employers expired and while I'd love to tell you all how much I'm enjoying some down time, I've actually been doing free-lance work.

I'm not concerned though, because I have a whole lot of nothing scheduled for the next few days.

While you'll all see one one of the free-lance stories very soon, and I will provide a link here, I also had the honor of doing a peer review of a book that's in the works. I'll wait until it gets published to post specifics, but will give everyone a big heads up because it'll be a must-read for serious college football fans.

In the meantime, I am proud to announce a pair of awards. This year the Associated Press Sports Editors, which is the organization when it comes to newspaper sports journalism, decided to allow on-line publications to apply for membership, and BamaOnline was one of seven approved by the membership.

My hope was to help out with the judging this past week in Indianapolis, but unfortunately that didn't work out. I did, though, land top-10 finishes in two categories, projects and beat writer. The project was the elaborate 15-part "Their place in history" series from last summer, and the beat writing required five stories to be submitted (from me it was a game story, feature, explanatory story, project and a think the fifth was a column).

First through fifth places will be announced in the coming days, but if that's how I go out as a beat writer I'm pretty happy with that.

Under 30,000 circulation division
Beat writing
Dustin Dopirak, The Herald-Times (Bloomington, Ind.)
Stephen Fastenau, The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette
Ben Frederickson, Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune
Tom Green, Opelika-Auburn News
Brendan Meyer, Columbia Missourian
Brad Elliott Schlossman, Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald
David Sparks, Daily News Journal (Tenn.)
Aaron Suttles, The Tuscaloosa News
Mike Vorel, Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune
Christopher Walsh, BamaOnline

Projects
BamaOnline: Christopher Walsh
Daily Chronicle (DeKalb, Ill.): Ross Jacobson, Steve Nitz, John Sahly, Kate Schott
Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle: Ben Baby
Kitsap Sun: Jeff Graham
St. Cloud (Minn.) Times: Mick Hatten
Sun Journal (Lewiston, Maine): Kalle Oakes
The Tuscaloosa News: Zackary Al-Khateeb, Andrew Carroll, Tommy Deas, Jamon Smith
Times-News (Twin Falls, Idaho): Nick Ruland
Wyoming Tribune-Eagle: Jeremiah Johnke
Yakima (Wash.) Herald Republic: Scott Sandsberry, Dave Thomas, Roger Underwood