On his way here to assume the role of chief spokesman for Metro, the 35-year-old Stessel watched the now-viral video: Harris, a man in a wheelchair, shoved to a U Street sidewalk in the midst of being arrested for having cracked open a can of malt liquor. Stessel immediately emailed his future colleagues: "You guys should take a look at this," he remembers writing.

Now that he's taken his post, the former New Jersey Transit flack has seen the intensity Metro's communications office can offer. Besides the ordeal with Harris, there was a carjacking in a Metro parking lot and a customer who jumped in front of a train. But Stessel says he faced similar drama at his old job. "At any moment you're at Defcon one," he says.

During such moments, Metro has often been opaque. The blog Unsuck D.C. Metro has long hammered the transit system for its lack of transparency. Stessel seems to be interested in putting an end to that. His first day of work, he was a guest blogger on the site.

As director of communications, he plans on engaging Metro riders through all available outlets, including Twitter, where Metro will reply to customer tweets. His ultimate goal is to make the Unsuck blog, which shines light on Metro's blunders, irrelevant by helping to improve both customer service and communication. "My goal is in several years, not to need it," he says of Unsuck.

Prodded about times when Metro seemed to put out spurious information, particularly when it comes to Metro crimes, Stessel says he can't comment on any past incidents. But he does offer that "information deteriorates the more people it flows through.” So Stessel says one  thing he'll be attempting to do is to make Metro employees, like transit police officials, directly available to reporters. Considering the amount of explaining something like the Harris video would take, let's hope that works out.

Photo courtesy of WMATA

For the second year in a row, contributor Jeffry Cudlin won the arts criticism category for his work, which this year included the following: "Pine of the Times" about the Martin Puryear retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, "Sheet Smart" about the Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibit at the Phillips Collection, and "Pain by Numbers," a wrap-up of what D.C. museums did and didn't offer in 2008.

Editor Erik Wemple won first place for media reporting/criticism with his cover story "One Mission, Two Newsrooms" about the Washington Post's struggle to bridge the cultural and geographic divide between its print and online operations.

In the elusive "innovation/format buster" category, the cover story some loved and others hated—"Washington City Paper Files for Chapter 86 Content Bankruptcy"— also took home first-place honors. The piece by Wemple, Managing Editor Andrew Beaujon, and Asst. Managing Editor Jule Banville was written and presented in the form of a legal document spoofing both the changing nature of City Paper's journalism and and the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by our paper's owners, Creative Loafing.

Creative Loafing's Atlanta paper received second-place honors in the feature category for the first-person account, "Sober," by Thomas Wheatley. The Chicago Reader, also our sister paper, received two second-place awards. Ann Ford was so honored in the arts feature category for "Life Without a Script" and columnist Ben Jarovsky's "The Works" was named in the column (political) category

The AAN Awards are open to its 130 member papers. Most of the altweeklies in U.S. cities (plus a few in Canada) enter the contest each year. This year, the top all-time AAN Award winner, the L.A. Weekly, led the pack with four first-place awards. In the 14-year history of the awards, Washington City Paper has won the second-most overall awards in the top-circulation categories: 51.