for the second year in a row, one of my stories won a gabby award from the georgia association of broadcasters. i’ve won an award every year since i’ve been there. how awesome is that? this year, i submitted a four-story series on an investigation into and the resignation of our former police chief. he was accused of doing some things that he just shouldn’t have been doing, and an investigation by a former georgia bureau of investigation agent confirmed several of them. and, that won us the best feature series.

the gabby is so hard to get a good shot of because it’s glass and the writing is in white.

the banquet was a lot of fun. my coworkers and i have never really hung out outside of work, and even though it was work-related it was still different. we weren’t in cartersville. we weren’t at the station. we were dressed up, relaxing and enjoying a nice meal together, though kevin, one of our morning show hosts, was asked if it counted as our monthly “family meals”. 🙂

in addition to my award, we won three other gabbys — best news story, best station produced psa and best station produced commercial — and four merit awards — 2008 station of the year, station produced promo/psa, non-news radio program and 208 community service radio station of the year. a merit award is given if two stations are tied during the voting. after a revote, the station coming in second receives a merit award. we totally should have won station of the year, though. the station in ellijay won it, and their entry (the entries for that, community service station of the year and personality of the year were played at the banquet) was just a generic “listen to us for news, sports and weather” promos with some sound thrown in. ours was my live coverage of the hostage situation that occurred right by our old apartment building. it was freaking awesome, although it was a little weird hearing myself. but again, we should have won that award. oh well. we won it in 2007, and next year we’ll reclaim it.

besides the gabbys and merit awards, we won a georgia operation lifesaver award and an award from the georgia army national guard. over all, we did well. we won two more awards than last year, which is great. next year we’ll win even more.

and, as you all can see, i went with the brown dress since everyone loved it so much. a woman at work used to be a hairstylist, so she teased my hair up to give me more height and left it a little messy. it really looked good. it wasn’t too high at all, but it definitely looked different and was much better than the plain way i usually wear it.

now, i’m starting to pick out stories to submit for next year. i already have several that would be great entries for the series category. i have to keep up my streak.