Gussied up prom-goers and their camera-toting parents swarmed the Hotel Roanoke Saturday, directing, adjusting and posing as they documented the beginning of a night of a high school version of glitz. Below a balcony where some of the young stars stood for their paparazzi, a decidedly less glamorous crowd gathered for the Virginia Press Association's banquet honoring some of the best journalism published in the commonwealth last year. The competition can be stiff. At the 2004 conference, The Washington Times' coverage of the fall of Baghdad was the second-place winner for spot news story. The Cavalier Daily does not compete against the biggest papers in Virginia. It competes against dailies with circulation numbers closer to its own. Most of those papers are produced by professionals, not by college students balancing journalism with academics. Measured against professionals, The Cavalier Daily's staff earned five writing awards for work published in 2011.
Caroline Gecker, now a Tableau editor, won first place for critical writing for her reviews of a Britney Spears album, a Fox comedy and a George Clooney movie. The judge wrote that Gecker "has an excellent voice - very conversational...." After complimenting the depth and insight of Gecker's work, the judge wrote, "Overall, the writing was bright, the analysis was interesting and balanced and the reviews held my attention."
Current Editor-in-Chief Matt Cameron, Jason Ally, Andrew Seidman, Alyssa Juan and Allie Vandivier - The Cavalier Daily's 122nd Managing Board - shared third place for editorial writing. The judge in that category particularly praised an editorial about chain stores on the Corner for its inclusion of real people's voices, not just the Managing Board's.
Kaz Komolafe, now The Cavalier Daily's managing editor, shared a second place award in education writing with Joseph Liss and Katherine Raichlen. Their series of stories examined the controversies and legal battles surrounding former University Environmental Sciences Prof. Michael Mann. The judge "liked that the newspaper didn't just treat it as a story-of-the-day situation and write about it when news broke, but also looked for the enterprise opportunities in between those instances. The legal aspects of the situation are clear and easy to understand."
Andrew Seidman, who earned a piece of the editorial writing award, also got second place in the in-depth or investigative reporting category for a two-part series about the Virginia men's lacrosse team. It dealt with the wisdom and ethics of recruiting of 15-year-olds, the effect one University lacrosse player's murdering another University lacrosse player had on the program's reputation and the culture and image and privilege of lacrosse players. The judge called it "[s]olid original reporting on an issue that is important to put before the university community: the tension and ethical dilemma coaches face in recruiting for a big-time lacrosse team."
Sam Carrigan's second place column entry included commentary on free speech, the sad state of Republican presidential debates and the need for a disabilities studies major at the University. The judge wrote, "Sam Carrigan's choice of issues and writing style serve his publication well. His column on the Irvine 11 was particularly effective. It's obvious he thoroughly thinks through his topic and brings his readers along his line of reasoning. Very nice work for a student newspaper."
The Cavalier Daily's staff has certainly had its share of problems with writing, reporting and judgment. Pointing out those problems, trying to explain how they happened and trying to help the staff figure out how to cut down on those problems is part of what this column is about. Many of those errors happen because these are students working as journalists. Students are, by definition, learning, and learning, by definition, requires some mistakes. Some problems come from the staff being human. People make mistakes, have lapses in judgment, see things better in hindsight. Professional journalists, like other people, do those things with startling regularity, so it is no surprise that student journalists would, too.
The people who put The Cavalier Daily together are not, in one sense, student journalists. They are students doing journalism.
There is no journalism program at the University, so none of The Cavalier Daily's staff is majoring in journalism. Few of them will make journalism their career. But sometimes what they do in The Cavalier Daily is not just very nice work for a student newspaper. It is nice work for a newspaper. Period.
That is worth celebrating.
Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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