Winners of the 2007 Utne Independent Press Awards

Image Gallery View the "Image Gallery" to see magazine covers of the winners Winners of the 2007 Utne Independent Press Awards

UPDATE: Visit the nominees and winners of the 2009 Utne Independent Press Awards.

To hear a podcast of editor in chief David Schimke and librarian Danielle Maestretti talking about the winners: Click Here and Here.

The process of picking the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award winners was technologically advanced and methodologically incontrovertible. The 111 magazines, journals, newsletters, alternative weeklies, and zines that were nominated by the Utne Reader staff two months ago were fed into a gigantic and infallible computer (Intel inside!) that performed sophisticated informational and qualitative meta-analyses and, with an authority befitting the great Oz or the great Google, spat out a list of the 15 winners within minutes. With the exception of a High Country News issue that got stuck in an intake chute (along with an intern’s hand) and a zine that the computer initially rejected as “unidentifiable media,” it all went as smoothly as our IT guys said it would.

And if you believe that, we’ve got a domain name we’d like to sell you. The fact is, computers can do many incredible things, but when it comes to sorting through the independent press in search of stories that surprise and delight us, good old human judgment—preferably the informed and enlightened kind—is still our best analytic tool. So the unglamorous truth is that we chose the winners in a blatantly old-school way, by reading the nominees extensively, then getting together to champion our favorite titles and challenge one another to examine our opinions. We’re a feisty bunch—hypocrisy was exposed, favoritism suspected, and personal tastes called into question—but at the end of the day we emerged with a roster of winners that we’re proud to present here.

The following pages tease out the juicy stuff that keeps us coming back to these publications, but we couldn’t fit everything we wanted into this section. So we’re relying on that newfangled Internet: For detailed profiles of the winners and a full list of nominees, visit the links below.

 —The Editors

The Winners:

General Excellence: Magazines: Colorlines; General Excellence: Zines: Macaroni; Best New Publication: Democracy;  Best Design Theme; Best Writing: The Sun;  Arts Coverage: Film Comment; In-Depth/Investigative Reporting: Intelligence Report; Environmental Coverage: Earth Island Journal; Health/Wellness Coverage: POZ;  Political Coverage: The Chronicle of Higher Education; Social/Cultural Coverage: Gastronomica; International Coverage: Foreign Policy;  Local/Regional Coverage: Alberta Views; Science/Tech Coverage: Science News; Spiritual Coverage: Shambhala Sun