Southeast Missouri State University’s student newspaper The Arrow won 12 awards last Saturday, April 5th at the Missouri College Media Association Convention, including two first-place honors.
During a ceremony at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo, The Arrow received a first place award for its website homepage and another first-place award for a feature page entitled “Bird’s Eye View”.
Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Media and faculty advisor for The Arrow Tamara Zellars Buck attended the event and said The Arrow received a number of awards for sports page design, sports writing, features, news writing and so on.
“We also received a second place award for Best Overall Newspaper. That one was especially gratifying because we were in a category with the nine largest schools in the state,” Buck explained.
The Arrow placed second in the state for Division I, a top level division which includes student newspapers at Lindenwood University, Missouri State University, Saint Louis University, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri-Kansas City, University of Missouri-St. Louis, University of Central Missouri and Washington University.
Professor Buck, with the help of The Arrow staff, selected 29 submissions entered for this competition. Twelve of those entries received an award of some kind which is, according to Dr. Buck, very gratifying.
“Any type of news content that a newspaper would be producing, we received recognition for,” she said.
Buck believes that those recognitions demonstrate that the newspaper staff is talented and that the journalism curriculum at Southeast is working.
“This is an external measure of the quality of the work that our students are producing,” Buck added.
She said these awards shows the level of success of the partnership between the university and Rust Communications in producing The Arrow.
The Missouri College Media Association is a student-led media organization which provides student journalists in the state of Missouri with leadership experience. It is a division of the Missouri Press Association, and Buck added that it is “sort of an affiliation between professionals and our student-run media within the state.”