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“It smells bad. It gets in your hair, and if you don't wash your hair every day, just that odor stays in your hair for the whole week.”

Cecilia Rice

Owner, The Nut Shop 


Five tons of popcorn?

Please find attached, Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the SPJ Green Eyeshade Award for Best Light Student feature, “What’s popping at Bryant-Denny Stadium?”

Home college football games at the University of Alabama involve logistics. Fans have to park around campus and find their seats. The teams use buses to make their way to Bryant-Denny Stadium. And, then there’s the food for the one hundred thousand fans. Cheering burns calories and that means trips to the concession stands for stadium dogs and nachos. APR newsroom student intern Emily Ahearn reports on the family owned business that handles one crunchy item on the menu.



Please click here to listen to the feature...

https://www.apr.org/news/2025-11-13/whats-popping-at-bryant-denny-stadium


Ahearn visited The Nut Shop in Tuscaloosa, on “popping day.” The work began with the arrival of a ton of unpopped kernels on a delivery truck bound for the “popping room.” The Nut Shop arranged to supply five tons of popcorn, per season, for Crimson Tide home games. This isn’t the only example of one supplier getting a corner on the snack market at Bryant-Denny Stadium. Ahearn also interviewed Laura McLaughlin, who produced the “Bear Bryant Show,” sponsored by Golden Flake potato chips.



Respectfully submitted.

“I mean, this enormous tragedy of Charlie Kirk being assassinated. And you know, what did Charlie Kirk do? He made a lot of arguments. He talked upset people. He said things people disagreed with.”

Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikipedia

Please find attached, Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the SPJ Green Eyeshade Awards for Best Podcast Episode, "APR Notebook: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia, and what happened to Charlie Kirk.”

Please click here to listen to the program.
https://www.apr.org/podcast/apr-notebook/2025-12-03/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-and-what-happened-to-charlie-kirk

Wales grew up in Huntsville in the 1960’s, in the shadow of the Apollo manned moon landings. He also spent hours making corrections to his family’s hardbound World Book encyclopedia. That helped inspire Wales to create the website Wikipedia, that attracts billions of visitors every month. The online encyclopedia, which is constantly updated by volunteer editors, also has its critics including Elon Musk. Wikipedia is accused of leaning left, and for having fewer female and African American editors.

Supporters of Wikipedia include Belarus’ so-called “President in exile” Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya. She reportedly won her election in the former Soviet nation. But, incumbent Alexander Lukashenko claimed fraud, seized power, and established what’s considered the last dictatorship in Europe. Authoritarian regimes appear to dislike Wikipedia since its online editors are difficult to track down and arrest.

Wales joined me on “APR Notebook” to talk about that, and his new book “The Seven Rules of Trust,” about the philosophy behind Wikipedia. He insists that if we don’t talk to people we disagree with, the result could be violence. Wales used the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as an example.

Alabama is known for its role in the civil rights movement, college football, and “white” barbecue sauce. But the state is also home to Pulitzer Prize winning writers and helped put astronauts on the moon. “APR Notebook” features interviews with guests ranging from six-time Grammy winning singer and songwriter Jason Isbell, and University of Alabama graduate, and two-time Emmy Award winning actor, Michael Emerson (Benjamin Linus of the TV series LOST.)

Respectfully submitted.

“They claim that everyone is created equal, but they don't treat people equally. And that, I think, is the way we've, at least I've been educated about like the civil rights,”

Benjamin Lundgal
University of Southern Denmark

Please find enclosed Alabama Public Radio’s entry for the SPJ Green Eyeshade award for Best Documentary, titled “…a death, a bridge, and a seat on the bus.” The Alabama Public Radio spent eleven months chronicling three critical anniversaries in the state’s civil rights history, without a budget.

Please click here to listen to the program.
https://www.apr.org/news/2025-12-12/a-death-a-bridge-and-a-seat-on-the-bus-an-apr-news-special

2025 marked sixty years since civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot twice by an Alabama State Trooper on February 18, 1965. APR listeners heard from eighty-eight-year-old Vera Jenkins-Booker, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital who was with Jackson for the eight days before he died.

His death sparked voting rights marchers to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where police on horseback attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas. The incident became known as “bloody Sunday.” Most of the marchers captured in black and white film that day appeared to be adults, but many of the protesters were teenagers. APR Gulf coast correspondent Lynn Oldshue spoke with Jeanette Howard-Moore and Diane Harris, who were school students caught up in the attack.

Americans aren’t the only ones studying events like “bloody Sunday,” the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the work of Rosa Parks and Doctor Martin Luther King. Junior. Europeans are watching, too. APR correspondent James Niiler covers stories from his hometown of Aarhus, Denmark that have impact in Alabama. He assembled a focus group of five students majoring in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark to hear their frank assessment of Alabama’s civil rights record.

2025 is also the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rosa Parks, who sparked the protest in 1955, is familiar to Danish young people. But, there’s more to her story that refusing to give up her seat to a white bus passenger. APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge visited the Rosa Parks Museum where an effort is under to tell the story of the civil rights icon, and to lobby the Library of Congress to relocate materials related to Parks to the city where the boycott took place.

Our series wraps up with remembrances from two people on the “front lines” of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that helped make Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior an international figure. APR student reporter Torin Daniel used never-before-heard archival audio from 2018 interviews with Fred Gray and Nelson Malden. Gray was the attorney to Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Malden was MLK’s barber. Gray recalls the planning process that went into the boycott and how King was the last of three names under consideration to lead the effort. Malden remembered the day, from the window of his barber, the day the boycott began.

Respectfully submitted.

Back in February, the US State Department asked me to speak to a foreign delegation. It was about APR’s coverage of human trafficking. One member of that group was an investigative reporter from Ukraine. When I was done, we were all smiling and taking pictures and shaking hands, and this journalist came up and pressed a book into my hands. It was poetry written by Ukrainians about the war with Russia. The stories of pain and loss hammered home for me the fact that I don't know firsthand what it's like in Ukraine, but one part time resident of Huntsville, does.

Imagine waking up one morning, opening that day's copy of The New York Times, and seeing yourself described as TV's “king of creepy.” My guest tonight got that distinction just last year. Two time Emmy award winning actor Michael Emerson is a University of Alabama graduate, and he once worked at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. We met his wife, Carrie Preston of the CBS TV series Elsbeth, just last month. Now, just in case you thought that creepy comment in the New York Times was a one off. the Washington Post later called Emerson “TV's most beloved creepy guy” four months later, and he seems to relish in that. Emerson starred as Ben Linus in the TV series "Lost" and the eccentric billionaire Harold Finch in Person of Interest. However, fans of the cult classic horror film "SAW" may remember him as the creepy hospital orderly Zep Hindle. Michael Emerson and I talk about his days at the University of Alabama and more. Next on APR Notebook.

One issue with preserving these cemeteries may be getting people, both black and white, to talk about it.

Alabama’s constitution still allows forced labor, 157 years after the thirteenth amendment abolished the practice. That’s not the only lasting impact of the slave trade in Alabama. APR spoke with the descendants of some of estimated four hundred thousand people enslaved here around the Civil War. Many say they can’t find the burial sites of their ancestors, due to unmarked graves or bad records kept by their white captors. Alabama Public Radio news spent nine months looking into efforts to find and preserve slave cemeteries in the state. Here's part one of our series we call “No Stone Unturned.”

The thirteenth amendment did away with slavery in the United States 157 years ago. Alabama voters may take similar action next month. The state’s Constitution still allows involuntary servitude. An estimated 400,000 slaves were held in Alabama before they were finally freed in 1865. APR spoke with the descendants of some of these people. They talked about trying to find the burial sites of their ancestors, and facing roadblocks not shared by their white neighbors.