Name: Leslie Dinaberg
Title: Contributor
You wrote every single Best Of entry this year. (Thank you!) How’d it go? Did you survive okay? Why start small when it’s so much better to “go big or go home!” After almost two decades of writing for just about every publication in Santa Barbara (including, sadly, many that no longer exist), the ginormous Best Of project was actually my very first story for the Independent. There were a LOT of moving parts to make the whole thing come together, but the best part was how happy every single person was to hear that they’d won the Best Of honors. Giving people good news was about as close as a journalist can hope to come to Oprah’s “you get a car, and you get a car” moment!