Cedars wins fifth straight award as top small-school student newspaper in Ohio, wins 6 of 10 categories

Staff report

Cedars won its fifth straight Frank E. Deaner Excellence in Collegiate Journalism award as the state’s top small-school student newspaper in the Ohio Newspaper Association’s annual contest.

The Cedars staff accepted the award at Thursday’s annual convention in Columbus. Cedars placed in all 10 categories for the first time, won first place in six of the categories and swept all three places in the best use of multimedia category.

Josh Burris and Amy Radwanski won first place in multimedia for a video story about the school of pharmacy’s call center. Photographers Naomi Harward, Campbell Bortel and Phoebe Schoeneweis and reporter Kjersti Fry contributed to the second-place entry of a report on the beginning of the chapel renovations at the end of 2016 spring semester. Burris, Anna Dembowski and Bortel won third place for their coverage of Ben Carson’s presidential campaign visit.

Arts and entertainment editor Emily Day and writers Kathryn Sill and Susanna Edwards won first place in arts and entertainment writing. Day’s story was about a sitcom pilot produced on campus. Sill wrote a profile about student musician Brendan Orchard, and Edwards wrote about a project that creates mats for the homeless. Campbell Bortel placed first in photojournalism for pictures of the cardboard canoe race and Ben Carson. Dembowksi also won first place in opinion writing.

The staff won first place for news coverage under the leadership of former editor-in-chief Dembowski and for sports coverage under former sports editor Jonathan Gallardo.

Second-place awards were earned for an in-depth reporting project about the pharmacy program, page design and headline writing. Cedars placed third in the best website category.

Cedars competed in Division B (enrollment under 10,000) against newspapers from John Carroll, Capital, Ashland, Findlay and Otterbein universities.

The Post at Ohio University won the Deaner Award in Division A for schools above 10,000 in enrollment. The Post competed against newspapers from Ohio State, Cincinnati, Toledo, Youngstown State and Sinclair Community College.

A new name for the organization was approved at the convention. Going forward it will be known as the Ohio News Media Association.