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Herald staffers win press awards
The Sylva Herald brought home two awards last week from the N.C. Press Association’s 79th Winter Institute in Chapel Hill.
Web designer and computer coordinator Nick Breedlove received an individual award, and he and the combined news staff won a first place for the photo pages that chronicled Hurricane Ivan’s devastating aftermath.
“These awards represent quite an honor,” said Herald publisher Jim Gray. “Our staff works very hard every week to bring our readers a quality newspaper, and it’s good to see their efforts receive statewide recognition.
Pulitzer Prize-winning North Carolina journalist Ed Yoder, left, presents awards to Sylva Herald staffers during last week’s N.C. Press Association Winter Institute in Chapel Hill. Accepting the newspaper’s first-place photo page award and second-place Web page design award are reporter Carey King, center, and Web designer/photographer Nick Breedlove. – Herald photo by Lynn Hotaling
“Our paper has served the county for more than 79 years with fair, in-depth coverage of local news and an unmatched commitment to publicizing community events,” Gray said. “These awards prove our staff ranks with any in the state and our paper holds its own with similar-sized publications across North Carolina.”
The Hurricane Ivan photo pages took top honors from among 37 entries submitted by the state’s community newspapers in the 3,500-10,000 circulation range. Breedlove’s layout included photos taken by him as well as Herald staffers Lynn Hotaling, Kelly Timco and Jeff Harlow. In addition, the Herald newsroom’s Carey Phillips, Carey King and Rose Hooper (who has since left the newspaper to handle publicity for Southwestern Community College) contributed to the flood coverage.
In addition, the pages featured photos submitted via e-mail by area residents Ed Riley, Christy Rowe, Tim Harrington, Lee Tritt, Barbara Eberly, Christy Bredenkamp, Susan Manning, Kirk Stephens, David Redman and Mark Haskett.
Judge Dave Eldridge said he was impressed by The Herald’s “super” use of black-and-white images.
“It doesn’t take many words to capture a story when you do it like this,” Eldridge said. “The dailies should copy this kind of work.”
Publisher Gray said he’s especially proud of the award for coverage in the wake of the flood.
“Our team was out first thing with cameras and pencils to capture the story and bring it to our readers,” Gray said. “I know how important the scenes were to the people who read our paper every week.”
Breedlove also won a second place in the General Excellence for Newspaper Web Sites category.
Breedlove gave The Herald’s site its first redesign since its establishment in late 1999, adding a miniature front page to define the site’s link to the printed newspaper. In addition, he added an easy-to-negotiate navigation bar and a Herald-specific search engine.
The Herald’s Web site ranked second among all community newspapers in the state. That category was division wide rather than broken into three circulation divisions, which meant The Herald competed against papers with much larger circulations.
“Easy reading, not cluttered,” was the judge’s comment about Breedlove’s Herald Web page.
Breedlove and King accepted the newspaper’s awards Feb. 17 from Ed Yoder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “Telling Others What to Think: Recollections of a Pundit,” published last year by Louisiana State University Press.
Yoder, who edited The Daily Tar Heel while in school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won his Pulitzer in 1979 while editorial page editor at the Washington Star. A Rhodes Scholar, he was also an editorial writer at the Charlotte News and then at the Greensboro Daily Record, where he took on “the John Birch Society and segregation, among other targets,” according to LSU Press. He joined the Washington Post Writers Group as a syndicated columnist in 1981, and his columns appeared in major newspapers around the country and abroad for the next 15 years.
Hotaling also attended the conference.
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