Prize possessions.

• Position: Business North Carolina and some staff win awards - Brief Article - Column

The judges in the annual Association of Area Business Publications editorial-excellence competition are getting awfully familiar with Irwin Speizer. Last year, he won the gold medal for best personality piece (and the year before that, the silver medal in the same category). This time around, he struck gold for best feature for The Crucible, last October's cover story on the changing of the guard at Nucor Corp.

"Speizer spins a tale that both fascinates the average reader and informs the true insider," commented the judges, members of the University of Missouri School of Journalism faculty. "This time around, he tackles a coup and tells the story of what really happened. Speizer's writing is strong, and his reporting impeccable. His tone is conversational, yet authoritative, a tough combination to conquer."

Irwin, who is married to the publisher of the Rock Hill, S.C., Herald, splits his time between covering Charlotte for the Raleigh News & Observer and writing for us. You'll find two more of those fascinating, informative tales of his, including this month's cover story, in the pages that follow.

Last year, Ed Martin won a gold medal for best local spin of a national/ economic story. This year, he took the silver for best investigative journalism for The Insider, which appeared in the March 1999 issue.

"Stock fraud is common," the judges wrote, "but too frequently goes unreported because it takes digging to document the details. This story does not break the news on the Mark Boyd case, but it does put his case into a larger context -- a human-nature context, a consumer-fraud context, a government-regulatory context. It...