Woman Around Town Wins Awards from the New York Press Club

NEW YORK - May 15, 2014 - PRLog -- For the fifth year in a row, Woman Around Town, a website for women in New York and Washington, D.C., has been honored for excellence in journalism by the New York Press Club. Alix Cohen’s article, “Fete Paradiso - Out of Time into Imagination,”  won for Special Event Reporting, while Marti Sichel’s article, “Unexplored Interior: An Important Lesson in History with Jay O. Sanders,” won for Entertainment News.

Alix and Marti will receive their awards at the New York Press Club’s Awards and Installation of Officers Dinner, Monday, June 9, at Manhattan’s Water Club. This year nearly 500 submissions were received from broadcast and publishing entities in the New York metropolitan area. Woman Around Town has now won 16 awards total, representing all five years the site has been operating. The awards are particularly noteworthy since Woman Around Town competes with major media outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg.

“These awards bring home, once again, what Woman Around Town strives to deliver - interesting, well-written stories, that educate and inform,” said Publisher Debra Toppeta. “We are particularly excited to see both Alix and Marti recognized for their valuable contributions to the site.”

Alix Cohen has won awards all five years. Her winning piece this year, “Fete Paradiso - Out of Time into Imagination,” brought vividly to life a carnival on Governor’s Island “such an enchantment as Colette’s Gigi might’ve attended.” Besides describing the many rides and attractions, Alix spoke with the people behind the scenes who were responsible for bringing this fantasy land alive.

Marti Sichel’s winning story came about when she attended a sold out reading for Jay O. Sanders’ “Unexplored Interior,” which she described as “a complex and sadly beautiful story of lives interwoven and then ripped apart.” Sanders’ play concerns the 100 days in 1994, when a wave of violence swept like a plague over Rwanda. The Hutu population “cleansed” villages of the Tutsi population. “Men, women and children were tortured, disfigured and then murdered.” Marti’s article tells how Sanders became intent on telling this story and has worked tirelessly to deliver it in play form to audiences.

Woman Around Town was launched in 2009 by Toppeta and Charlene Giannetti, the site’s editor who has won six awards from the New York Press Club. Toppeta, an attorney, is a member of the Press Club’s Board of Governors. Giannetti is a veteran journalist and the author of 12 books. Her most recent, Parenting in a Social Media World, is a collection of her columns on Woman Around Town.