Alonzo Weston joined the News-Press in 1989 as an intern. He currently covers education and mental health and is an award-winning columnist. A 2002 graduate of the inaugural class of the Diversity Institute at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., he has been voted the city's favorite newspaper columnist for the past 13 years. He’s won numerous Missouri Press Association awards for his columns, features and investigative reporting. He's been published in magazines and has had byline stories in the Nashville Tennessean and the New York Daily News. He received the YWCA/NAACP Kelsey Beshears Racial Justice Award in 2005. The East Side Rotary Club also presented Alonzo with its Community Service Award in 2004. He received a Department of Mental Health Media Award in 2002 for a series of stories on local mental health issues, and created a journalism workshop for minority youth called Reporting L.I.V.E.
