Metro Times won four editorial awards in the Michigan Press Association's Better Newspaper Contest for this year, and other departments of the paper took an additional 12 awards.
In the Class A Weekly division — for papers with circulation of more than 25,001 copies — Metro Times was awarded first place for general excellence, first place for design, second place for enterprise reporting and third place for feature writing. The enterprise reporting award was for the story "Blood money," by former staff writer Joe Kirschke, which tallied the staggering costs of a shooting crime. The feature writing award went to freelancer Jonathan Cunningham for "Romancing the hood," which recounted how former Detroiter Vickie Stringer went from college student to convict to millionaire publisher of hard-boiled fiction. Kirschke and Cunningham's stories are now linked from the homepage at metrotimes.com.
Metro Times placed third in the Web site contest in Division A for all Michigan papers with circulation of 20,000 or more.
In addition, the paper won 11 awards for retail ads, classified ads and promotions; eight of those awards were first-place winners, including best ad idea, best online promotion and best special section.
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