Heavy medal thunder.

• Position: Awards for Business North Carolina - Brief Article

Consistency, as Emerson claimed, might be the hobgoblin of little minds, but it's the hallmark of a great magazine. That's why I was thrilled when Contributing Editor Irwin Speizer received the gold prize for best magazine feature in this year's Association of Area Business Publications editorial-excellence competition. That makes two years running he has won it.

Last year, he got the gold for his account of the changing of the guard at Nucor Corp. This year, he scored with last September's cover story on lawyer O. Max Gardner III, who found a way for workers to force Shelby Yarn Inc. into bankruptcy. Here's what the judges, members of the University of Missouri School of Journalism faculty, had to say about "Spinning a Yarn."

"And a good yarn it is. The author interweaves the stories of the shutdown of a mill with that of a member of a famous family. Politics, business and race are all factors at play. Speizer compellingly puts the elements together in a complex story."

In all, we won six awards among the 484 entries submitted by 46 member publications. Irwin also captured the bronze prize in the open category -- for both magazines and newspapers -- for best local spin of a national business/economic story. He won it with his cover story on cigarette smuggling. which appeared in the December issue.

"The contraband cigarette market -- the product of widely disparate state excise taxes that give new meaning to 'buy low, sell high' -- is the focus of this well-written story. Speizer not only offers juicy details of sting operations but reports why state and local officials have largely ignored the problem."

BNC won the gold prize in the open category for best headlines. (Last year, we took home the silver.) "This collection of headlines is consistently strong. All of them do exactly what a good headline should: pique interest and thrust...