We have some good news to share. The 2024-2025 Alberta Magazine Awards finalists have been announced and The Sprawl is nominated in five categories!

Our Sprawlcast on Canmore's controversial Three Sisters Mountain Village development, Undermined: The Long Fight Over Canmore's Future, is shortlisted in the Alberta Story, Editorial Package and Feature Writing (Long) categories.

On top of that, Calgary photojournalist Gavin John—whose work was recently published in the New York Times—is shortlisted in the Photograph: People & Portraiture category for his photo of Canmore coal miner Raymond Haimila.

These nominations are particularly satisfying because we did our Canmore series in collaboration with The Narwhal, another independent Canadian publication, working closely with Prairies reporter Drew Anderson to dig deep into the decades-long story.

The Sprawl is also nominated in the Feature Design category for The Real Costs of Calgary's New BMO Centre, with photography by Gavin John and cover design by Chris Pecora. It's exciting to see The Sprawl's design getting a nod as it's something we put a lot of care into making all of our podcast episodes readable as well as listenable.

The Alberta Magazine Awards winners will be announced in September. Wish us luck! I am truly fortunate to work with such talented creators.

Speaking of talented creators... Sam Hester's Art Bus is now out and about in Calgary, along with the buses of six other artists.

Or, should I say, Sam's Art Buses—plural. Each artist has two buses featuring their designs!

Sam's Art Bus is called Bus Roots, and it's covered with Calgary landmarks. If you've read Sam's Curious Calgary comics in The Sprawl, you'll recognize a lot of what you see on her bus design.

You can keep your eyes peeled for Sam's buses in the wild... or... I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

You can see where her (or any!) buses are in realtime using a nifty online tool calledTransit55.

Sam's buses are No. 8260 and 8276. If you pop those numbers into the Transit55 search bar, you can see exactly where each bus is and what route it's on. If you want to get fanatical about it, as I have, you can even save the page to your phone home screen. And then you can just check anytime to see where the buses are.

Using this same tool, if you pop in your own bus route number, you can see, in realtime, where the buses are on your route. It's very handy. I use it often, also saving each route I use to my iPhone home screen for quick access.

Talk about news you can use!

Meanwhile, we are into a busy season with The Sprawl's pop-up press. The Wordfest/Calgary Public Library Reading in the Wild event at Central Memorial Park last week was a good initiation. I went in thinking that, this being a reading event and all, it would be a quiet affair.

Wrong! The readers kept us busy the whole three hours.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, we were at The Confluence for Canada Day—another very busy afternoon.

All of this has been good preparation for the real test of our mobile printing operation: Stampede breakfasts. Yahoo!

Here's where we'll be over the next couple weekends:

Saturday, July 5 (today!):
Renfrew Stampede Day
811 Radford Rd. N.E.
9 - 11:30 a.m.

Neighbour Day Party (rescheduled from June)
4th St. & Meredith Rd. N.E.
3 - 5 p.m.

Saturday, July 12
Sunalta Stampede Breakfast
13th Ave. between 16th & 17th St. S.W.
9 - 11:30 a.m.

If you're around, swing by and make a print—we'd love to see you out there.

And if you value The Sprawl's independent Calgary journalism, make sure to pitch in and support our work so we can do more of it!

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.