The Ahwatukee Foothills News is a twice-weekly paper serving Ahwatukee, Arizona. It has a circulation of 28,000. First published as the Ahwatukee Sentinel in 1976 its name was changed to the Ahwatukee News in 1978. In 1988 it once again changed its name, this time to the Ahwatukee Weekly News. The current incarnation is the Ahwatukee Foothill News. Its education and sports coverage mainly revolves around two local high schools: Mountain Pointe High School

Mountain Pointe High School

Mountain Pointe High School is a secondary school located in the community of Ahwatukee, which is in the southern part of Phoenix, Arizona. Mountain Pointe is a part of the Tempe Union High School District....

 and Desert Vista.

The newspaper was owned by Freedom Communications

Freedom Communications

Freedom Communications, Inc. is a media conglomerate in the United States. It owns approximately 100 daily and weekly newspapers in the US, with a combined daily circulation of nearly one million subscribers, and also operates over seventy local news websites...

, who sold it to 1013 Communications in 2010.

Occasionally, the paper is referred to by its initials, the AFN.

Staff

Editor & Publisher

Mike Miller - Publisher

Kelly Mixer - Managing Editor

Becky Kedzierski - Office Manager

News Staff

Emily Whitmore - Design and Website Editor

Travis Roemhild - Staff Writer

Allison Hurtado - Staff Writer

Jason P. Skoda - Sports Writer

Beverly Stidham - Calendar Editor, Editorial Assistant

Awards

The paper as a whole took home five awards from the 2008 Arizona Newspapers Association Better Newspapers contest. Being judged in Division 3 (Non-Daily circulation greater than 10,000), the AFN took home first place for Departmental News & Copywriting Excellence, and four third-place awards: General Excellence; Best Use of Photography; Community Service/Journalistic Achievement; and Special Section, Newspaper Supplement or Magazine.

Individually, there was one winner: Former sports reporter Ryan Casey won three awards: Best Team, Sport or Sports Beat Coverage (1st place, Desert Vista); Best Sports Story (2nd place, Desert Vista football); and Best Lifestyle Feature Story (3rd place, "A Long Road Back").

(Note: Its sister paper, the Maricopa Tribune also had an individual winner, Brett Fera, in Best Sports Story (1st place) in the Non-Daily circulation under 3,500 category.)

Five current and former staffers won awards at the 2007 Arizona Press Club banquet: Brant Clinard, a photographer, won seven awards, including two first places; Jason Ludwig took home first- and third-place awards for reporting; U. Frank Williams, the former photo editor, took home a second place award; Brett Fera, sports editor, won first place for sports reporting; and Ryan Casey, former staff writer, won second- and third-place awards for sports reporting. Only Fera currently remains with the paper, heading its sports department.

Projects

The paper celebrated its 30th year starting in early 2008. Since then, it has been running stories commemorating the anniversary. Another recent project has been a series on transportation, with four stories to date.

Online

The online product, which refers to itself as "ahwatukee.com," now publishes daily updates, between three and six videos a week, and also features staff blogs. Its biggest update days are Monday and Thursday, when all the content from each of the two papers that week has been created and edited.

The staff has also made forays into social mediums, such as Twitter and Facebook.