If only we had known before Spoleto, we could have touted Patrick Sharbaugh’s Spoleto Buzz Blog as an award-winning production of the City Paper — because that’s just what it is. Friday afternoon in Portland, the winners of the annual alt-weekly awards were announced and Patrick’s blog took first place in a tight competition against the Arkansas Times and the Portland Mercury.

It’s a much-deserved pat on the back for Sharbaugh, who just spent 17 exhausting days providing insightful, street-level coverage of the beast that is Spoleto.

Congrats Patrick and great f’in job.

I’m currently in Portland at the annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention where we’ve had a round-up of interesting speakers, from Arianna Huffington to Bill Hightower.

Unfortunately, I missed Huffington’s panel, but encountered her afterwards signing books. As she was inscribing my copy, she queried me on where I was from and asked if I was interested in “covering the races.” A bit flustered, all I could think of was, you know, the races — blacks, whites, etc. Being from Charleston, it was the first thing that popped into my head. But then I realized she meant election races. We exchanged cards and I quickly left to find some colleagues to tell me what the hell I had missed in the seminar. Turns out, she’s interested in altweeklies linking with the Huffington Post, enabling her site to become a hub for all the races across the country.

The convention’s been a blast and today, we have a free day in Portland, seeing as our flight got messed up and we were booked to leave last night instead of this morning. Oh well. Looks like we’ll have time to explore. We’re planning to hit the Body exhibit, which we missed when it was in Atlanta last year.

I’ll post some pics if I can ever find that damn camera cord.