FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

April 10, 2006

Contact: Chelsey Walden

E-mail: cwalden@iastate.edu

Telephone: (608) 469-1339

 

Greenlee School gets five firsts in Mark of Excellence contest

 

ST. LOUIS – The Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication garnered five first-place awards in the regional Mark of Excellence Awards announced Saturday, April 8.

            The Iowa State Daily and Ethos took first place in the best daily and best magazine categories, respectively, at the annual SPJ Region VII Conference, which was held at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Second-place in the daily newspaper competition went to the Daily Iowan at the University of Iowa and third place to the Maneater at the University of Missouri.

The Greenlee Web Team won for the best independent online publication based on its Web site designed to celebrate the schoolís 100^th anniversary.

            Other winners were Iowa State Daily staff members Eric Gapstur and Ricky Rud. Gapstur was honored for editorial cartoons, and Rud gained his award in the category of best sports writing. Gapstur submitted cartoons about President Bush and Social Security reform, a campus evangelist and flag burning versus desecrating the Quran. Rud won for a feature he wrote on Abraham and David Rotich, Kenyan brothers who run on the ISU track and field team.

All five winners advance to the national competition. Those winners will be announced at the SPJ national convention in Chicago in August.

            The Greenlee School managed three second-place finishes. Those included Erin McCuskey of Ethos for non-fiction writing; Uhuru for magazines that publish more than once a year; and a Web site on the history of the Iowa State Daily created by students in Daniela Dimitrova's new media class and David Bulla's U.S. press history class.

            ISUtv took third place in the television feature category. Daniel Brauer, Louis Kishkunas, Dawone Robinson and Ben Hrncirik worked on that project together. The foursome made a feature on Ryan Doll, an ISU student who successfully ran for Ames City Council.

            All entries had to be completed during the 2005 calendar year.

            The conference featured a speech by former Washington Post Sunday feature writer Walt Harrington. Now a journalism professor at the University of Illinois, Harrington implored students to report about the lives of ordinary people.

Other speakers included Todd Frankel, Tim OíNeil and Jaimi Dowdell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Charles Davis and Roger Fidler of the University of Missouri, Christine Tatum of the Denver Post, Holly Edgell of KOMU, Molly McDonough of the ABA Journal and Mark McCormick of the Wichita Eagle. Tatum is president-elect of SPJ.

            Bulla, the ISU chapter adviser, took part in the annual regional meeting. Attending the convention for the Greenlee School were Gapstur, Hrncirik, Robinson, Bulla, Tom Barton, Kelsey Ehlers, Joe Owens and Adam Kuban.

            The Cyclone chapter wants to thank the Iowa Newspaper Foundation for supplying a $500 grant to help defray some of the costs of the conference.

       SPJ was founded in 1909 and "is the nation's largest and most broad-based journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior."

 

 

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