By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, 2009
A short, characteristically wry FishbowlLA post from January 2009 flagged a closing entry deadline — and gently needled the Los Angeles Press Club for leaving the blog off its mailing list.
Then
The notice was a public-service item with an edge. FishbowlLA’s Tina Dupuy reported that she had found word of the L.A. Press Club’s National Entertainment Awards not in an email, but on Craigslist, and let the reader feel the small slight before getting to the details.
The awards were open to writers, broadcasters, bloggers and critics covering show business, with entries due that February 6. Categories spanned film, television, music and local theatre, with first-place and runner-up prizes for best entertainment news story, best feature and critic of the year across print, online, TV and radio. The entry fee was $35.
The post closed with the Press Club’s own framing: a non-profit based in the entertainment capital, devoted to journalism, and already running its Southern California Journalism Awards for half a century.
Now
The Los Angeles Press Club is still very much in business, and the contest the 2009 item described has grown rather than shrunk. It now runs as the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards, a separate program from the long-running Southern California Journalism Awards.
What has changed is the ecosystem the awards measure. In 2009 the categories still treated print, online, TV and radio as four distinct worlds; in the years since, those lines blurred as outlets went digital-first and podcasts and streaming video became their own beats.
The detail that dates the post most sharply is the Craigslist sighting. A working journalist hunting for an industry notice on a classifieds site captures a specific late-2000s moment, just before social platforms became the default channel for exactly this kind of announcement.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.