This past Saturday, Mrs. Media Nation and I had a great time spending the evening with old friends from the Boston Phoenix at the New England Newspaper & Press Association awards dinner. I was there because Harvey Silverglate and I had been nominated in the right-to-know reporting category for the 2009 Muzzle Awards; we ended up taking second place.

Overall, the Phoenix cleaned up. I was especially pleased to see Mike Miliard win Journalist of the Year, one year after Phoenix political columnist David Bernstein took the honor. There were so many first-place awards that I will just point to this rather than try to list them all. If I may, I’ll just single out one other — Kristen Goodfriend, who won first place in design, and who always makes all of us look good in print.

You can find all the NENPA winners here.