Crimson Wins National Newspaper Awards

The Harvard Crimson was named one of the top college dailies in the country at the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP) convention in Nashville last week.

The newspaper took home several top awards, including the convention’s highest honor, the Pacemaker award, which is presented to the 25 best college newspapers in the nation. This year marks the second time in three years that The Crimson has received the Pacemaker award.

Crimson reporters were also awarded honors in the Reporter of the Year, Sports Story of the Year and Design of the Year categories.

“I’m so proud of The Crimson,” said Crimson President Erica K. Jalli ’05. “I feel like all of our hard work and dedication has really paid off.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian was the only other Ivy-league paper to receive the Pacemaker. Other recipients include Northwestern University’s The Daily Northwestern, and New York University’s Washington Square News.

Katharine A. Kaplan ’06 came in first place in the Reporter of the Year category for her work last January on a five-part investigative piece on the quality of mental health services at Harvard.

“I think that this award is important because it really gives us, as reporters on The Crimson, a reason to work hard to write articles that really make a difference in the community,” she said.

Crimson Sports Co-Chair Timothy J. McGinn ‘06 won the first place prize for Sports Story of the Year for “Rah, Rah, Rah, Rah, Who Cares?”—an article he wrote last spring for The Crimson’s weekend magazine, Fifteen Minutes, on the lack of student support for Harvard athletics.

“I was kind of surprised—you don’t really expect a Harvard sports story to win sports story of the year,” he said.

Design Co-Chair Michael R. Conti ’05 received an award in two different categories of the Design of the Year. He came in second place in the “News Page/Spread” category for his work on a spread in the baseball and softball supplement last spring, and received an honorable mention in the “Newspaper Page One” category, along with Nahu S. Ghebremichael ’06 and Irene Y. Sun ’07, for the design of a front page last semester.

“This is a major accomplishment for The Crimson and especially the design board,” Conti said yesterday.

“It is the first time that we won two design awards in one year,” Conti added. “I think that is a testament to how well we have implemented the color redesign in less than a year. We’ve raised the bar and set a great example for guards in the years ahead to follow.”

Submissions to the contest are judged every year by the staff of a professional newspaper in the convention host city. Editors and reporters from the Nashville Tennessean selected this years Pacemakers.

According to the ACP website, Pacemaker recipients were selected based on the quality of writing and reporting, coverage and content, the editorial page, design, photography, art and graphics.

“This award proves that we’ve still managed to continue a tradition of excellence,” Jalli said. “I think that we’ve been able to take the paper to yet another level.”