Herald receives 14 awards at GPA convention

JEKYLL ISLAND – The entire Albany Herald news staff, including some who are no longer with the newspaper, received recognition for their work during 2017 and the newspaper was recognized for General Excellence in its division at the Georgia Press Association’s annual Better Newspaper Contest.

The awards were announced at the GPA’s convention over the weekend.

The Herald, for the first time in several years, was recognized for General Excellence, taking third place among the state’s medium-sized daily publications. The newspaper’s staff also earned 13 individual awards.

“This is pretty amazing, and it speaks well of the hard work and dedication of The Herald’s staff,” interim Editor Carlton Fletcher said. “As long as I’ve been associated with the newspaper — and that’s a pretty long time — I can’t ever remember staff receiving this many awards.

“I think it speaks well of the individual reporters at the newspaper, as well as the leadership over the years of (former editor) Jim Hendricks and (former managing editor) Danny Carter. This is the kind of excellence we should always strive for. I hope that the readers of The Herald and the community appreciates our staff’s efforts to provide the best news coverage we can provide.”

Hendricks, who left the newspaper to take a position with the Albany Museum of Art, took first place in the Class B Editorial Writing category, the only first-place award among The Herald’s 14 total. Hendricks also took second-place honors in the Humorous Column category.

Staff — including Fletcher, Jennifer Parks, Terry and Jon Gosa — contributed to a series on poverty that earned The Herald one of seven second-place finishes, this one in the Community Service category. Due to the number of entries in that category, The Herald’s entry was judged against newspapers in the B and A divisions, the latter including the state’s largest newspapers.

Other second-place awards were for staff’s (Gosa, Lewis, Parks, Fletcher and retired staff writer/historian Mary Braswell) coverage of the January 2017 storms that devastated the region in the Local News Coverage and Breaking News Writing categories. Sports Editor Ron Seibel earned second place in Sports Coverage, and Gosa received second-place recognition in the Spot News Photo category. Former writer Cindi Cox was recognized in the Investigative Reporting category.

Third-place awards went to The Herald for its Lifestyle Coverage (which also included all Class A and Class B papers), the Sports Section or Pages, Editorial Page, a Sports Feature by sportswriter Chauntel Powell and a Feature Photo by Lewis.

The Savannah Morning won the prestigious Freedom of Information Award for doing the most during 2017 to uphold the principles of the First Amendment and to protect the public’s right to know. The Morning News was honored specifically for its battle to get its local public hospital and public hospital authority to comply with Georgia’s Open Records Act.

In a pending case, the Morning News sued Memorial University Medical Center for documents about the hospital’s proposed sale to one company, about its completed sale to another company, and for the legal bills paid by the hospital regarding the Open Records Act requests from the newspaper.

Judging for the award was done by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“Public institutions must know that if they keep secrets, the local newspaper will battle them, in court. And that they won’t back down,” the judge for the award said.

Two young journalists were honored as winners of GPA’s Emerging Journalist Awards. Journalists younger than 30 with less than five years of experience writing professionally for a newspaper — one from the state’s daily newspapers and one from the state’s weeklies — were honored for demonstrating excellence and maintaining high standards of quality and ethics. The daily newspaper winner was Shaddi Abusaid of the Marietta Daily Journal. The weekly newspaper winner was Halei Lamb of The Forest-Blade of Statesboro.

Winners in the Georgia Press Association Better Newspaper Contest were honored for their outstanding achievements in newspaper journalism. Entries were judged in seven divisions based on circulation.

The photograph chosen as the Photo of the Year was taken by Clay Neely of The Newnan Times-Herald. It depicts the father of Benjamin Hosch III, a 5-year-old boy who drowned while attending a summer day camp last July. Hosch is speaking at a news conference days after the accident. Neely’s photo won the news photo award for Division C. All first-place winners in photo categories were considered for Photo of the Year.

Six hundred six awards were presented in 41 categories to 73 newspapers at the convention. Judging was done by members of the Kansas and Oklahoma press associations in February and March.