Every January the GLAAD Media Awards nominations roll out, and every January most outlets cover the film and TV slates and skip the print ones. The 2011 list is worth revisiting because the Los Angeles entries on it are a small map of how the city’s papers covered an LGBTQ story that was both a journalism milestone and a tragedy.
Then
The 22nd GLAAD Media Awards nominees were announced in late January 2011. Two Los Angeles outlets sat on the print side of the list. The LA Times was up for Outstanding Newspaper Overall Coverage. LA Weekly was up for Outstanding Newspaper Article — for Steve Friess’s piece “A Tragic Love Story,” published August 19, 2010, about Mike Penner, the Los Angeles Times sports columnist who in 2007 had announced she was transitioning and would be writing as Christine Daniels, returned to the Mike Penner byline two years later, and died by suicide in November 2009.
The Friess piece was the kind of long-form reporting that the alt-weekly model in its better years could do better than dailies — a deeply reported reconstruction of Penner’s marriage, transition, detransition, and final months, drawing on family members, colleagues, and the public record of her own columns. It wasn’t a media-criticism piece about the Times’ coverage; it was reporting on a person.
The rest of the print list, for context, included The Salt Lake Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, and SF Weekly’s Lauren Smiley. The magazine list was Advocate/Out, Chronicle of Higher Education, Entertainment Weekly, People, US Weekly. The Los Angeles theater category included pieces by Robert Aguirre-Sacasa, Jay Paul Deratany, Chris Phillips, L. Trey Wilson, and Tom Jacobson. The original FishbowlLA post correctly predicted Friess’s piece was likely to win in its category.
Now
Steve Friess won that GLAAD Media Award for “A Tragic Love Story” in spring 2011, the win was widely covered, and the piece is still one of the most-cited examples of long-form LGBTQ journalism from the era. Friess has spent the years since on Knight-Wallace fellowships, contract writing for major outlets, and academic appointments — including teaching journalism at the University of Michigan.
LA Weekly itself has had a much harder 16 years than that single nomination would suggest. After the 2012 layoffs at Voice Media Group, the title was sold to Semanal Media in late 2017 — a transaction that gutted the editorial staff and was followed by a years-long advertiser and reader backlash. It still publishes, but the institution that produced the Friess piece functionally no longer exists. The LA Times has gone through its own ownership turn — Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the paper from Tronc in 2018 and the paper continues to face significant staff reductions, with another round of newsroom cuts hitting in 2024.
The GLAAD Media Awards themselves are now in their thirty-sixth year. The categories Maya remembers being marginal in 2011 — digital journalism, blogs, comics — are now the heart of the show. Streaming-era programming dominates the screen categories. And the kind of print long-form that earned LA Weekly its 2011 nomination is the thing that almost every paper on that historical list now has to defend ever doing again.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2011 snapshot