Sunday, October 31, 2010

Daily News takes top design awards


The Ball State Daily News won seven national awards at this weekend’s College Media Convention, including a share of the best-of-show competition and two first-place finishes for newspaper design.

Kyle Lewis won the Page One Design of the Year Award from Associated College Press, which sponsors the convention with College Media Advisers. Becky Rother won the first place award for newspaper page design. The awards were presented Saturday at the convention in Louisville.

Elsewhere, the Daily News was among nine finalists for the top Pacemaker Award and placed in the Best-of-Show contest featuring the top 10 newspapers at the conference.

Honorable mentions went to the Daily News staff for multimedia story of the year, and to former Editor-in-Chief Vinnie Lopes for sports story of the year.

American Collegiate Press is the oldest and largest national membership organization for college student journalists. The group’s member publications include more than 20,000 students.

The Daily News earlier this year won national online awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. Opinion writer Derek Wilson was named the best college newspaper columnist in the country by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Complete list of winners:

http://studentpressblogs.org/louisville2010/?p=26

Friday, October 8, 2010

Daily News wins top national awards


The Ball State Daily News on Friday (Oct. 8) won 90 Gold Circle Awards for News from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, including top awards for overall newspaper design, Page 1 design, and news and feature packages.

Former graphics editor Stephanie Cope, now on the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, won half a dozen first-place awards, including top honors for Page 1 design and news-page design.

The international student press association, based at Columbia University, judged entries produced between mid-June of 2009 and the same period in 2010.

The newspaper’s online operation, bsudailynews.com, earlier this year won 15 Gold Circle Awards for Online Media, including all six places in the Interactive Graphics category. It was the paper’s best-ever showing in the online division.

Last month the Daily News was named a finalist for five national awards by American Collegiate Press, including the group’s highest honor, the Pacemaker for general excellence. Winners in that contest will be announced Oct. 30 at the National College Media Convention in Louisville.

Complete list of CSPA winners:
http://cspa.columbia.edu/docs/contests-and-critiques/gold-circle-awards/recipients/2010-collegiate-circles.html#N117F4

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Cady book takes a look at Star's colorful past


If there were ever a time for a newspaper memoir, this would be it – a battered industry, diminished by nearly half its revenue and thousands of newsroom hands, ought to welcome a look to its more colorful past.

Dick Cady’s new book, “Deadline: Indianapolis, The Story Behind the Stories at the Pulliam Press,” (www.RiverviewBooks.com, $19.95), does what a good memoir should do – share stories.

Cady has four decade’s worth of tales. The former Indianapolis Star investigative reporter and columnist helped win the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1970s for reporting on police corruption, along with more than 50 local, state and national awards, including the Associated Press Freedom of Information Award.

His book takes readers behind the scenes as those stories took shape, revealing formerly off-the-record information for the first time, in some cases.

Cady reflected on the changes in the city and its newspaper before a book-signing at Bookmamas in Irvington on Saturday (Oct. 2).

Readers of “Deadline” will find a tumultuous business as different from today’s newsrooms as a Wild West show is from a tea social.

Cady’s first day at The Star in 1962 reads like something Ben Hecht might have typed.

“The afternoon trickled by. I was in the men’s room when a craggy-faced gentleman in his sixties came in,” he writes.

“Ignoring me, he opened the towel dispenser, seized a bottle of gin and took a healthy gulp. ‘Arthritis,’ photo editor Don McClure explained. After restoring his medicine to its hiding place, he began telling me about his Navy days.”

The Indianapolis of nearly 50 years ago was a bleaker, monochromatic place with no professional sports and little downtown energy or nightlife, Cady says.

And while in recent years city police have made news in several lurid episodes, including a fatal alcohol-involved crash in broad daylight, the department is surely more serene than the force back then.

When it comes to police, “there’s a difference between institutionalized and systematic (corruption),” Cady said.

“Certain things with police officers and police departments are going to happen. But in the early part of the 20th century up to the 1950s and ‘60s, it became part of the system. It was pretty widespread and pretty entrenched.”

Today, the police are better behaved but the newspaper that watches them has fewer resources to do its job. Cady laments the changes in the news business.

“For most of my career in journalism, newspapers were the kings,” he writes.

“Then the rise of TV news, accelerated by cable and satellite, and the growth of the Internet doomed most afternoon papers and forced many of the morning dallies to change.

“To survive some of them adapted cereal-box formats, emphasizing style, color and graphics with shorter, puffier stories.”

While those changes occurred nearly everywhere, Cady focuses on his former newspaper and names the editors he blames for the decline. As a result, this is the kind of book that insiders open at the end first, looking for an index to see if they’re named.

There is no index, but the writer is thorough. If they were in charge, they’re here.

(Dick Cady’s next book-signing is at the Holiday Author Fair on Dec. 4 from noon to 4 p.m. at the Indiana Historical Society, 450 W. Ohio St., Indianapolis.)