Recent Awards at the DP

DP General Manager Jacobs Receives National Award

Longtime DP General Manager Eric Jacobs was honored by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) as its 2007 Newspaper Advertising Educator of the Year. The award was presented at the Association's annual Marketing Conference in Las Vegas.

The award honors an educator "who has demonstrated dedication, caring and nurturing of students in the pursuit of a career in newspaper advertising". It was one of 8 awards presented at a luncheon for more than 3,000 newspaper industry executives in attendance. Jacobs thanked the NAA for its training and development support for college newspapers in his acceptance speech.

DPAA Awards Top Writing, Photography for 2006

Each year, the DPAA presents three awards to students at the DP Banquet. DPAA Board member and this year's judging coordinator Adam Rubin presented the awards at the January 13, 2007 event at the Inn at Penn.

The DPAA's Photography Award recognizes top piece of photojournalism from the past year, and comes with a $250 prize. This year's winner was Toby Hicks '09, for "Sweet Revenge for that Bad Grade," a photo of Engineering professors taking pies in their faces.

Click here for a larger version of the winning photo

The DP alumni who judged this year's photography entries were: Alyssa Cwanger '04, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Tracy Gitnick Herriott '95, Associated Press; and freelance photographers Evelyn Hockstein '97, Sarah Putnam '74, & J.J. Tiziou '02. Cwanger said of the winning entry, "This photograph captures good expressions on the faces of the subjects and illustrates a fleeting moment from an interesting event."

The Page One Award seeks to recognize a student who "searched out a news story, pursued it and persevered in getting the story into print, with accuracy and objectivity, and with appropriate follow-ups." The importance and thoroughness of the reporting is of premium importance. It comes with a $500 prize.

The winner was reporter Jared Miller '09, for his coverage of the shooting of an Engineering sophomore in January 2006, and follow-ups, including a look at other urban campuses' tactics in fighting crime.

[Click here to read the original breaking news story]
[Click here to read the first follow up, interviewing the shooting victim]
[Click here to read the second follow up as the investigation stalled]
[Click here to read the in-depth follow up probing campus police's abilities in the wake of the shooting]

The DP alumni judges for the Page One Award were Binyamin Appelbaum '01, Charlotte Observer; Bob Frost '60, former DPAA president; Chris George '05, Arizona Republic; Ross Kerber '89, Boston Globe; and Charles Ornstein '96, Los Angeles Times.

"Jared Miller's crime series is good blocking-and-tackling reporting," commented Kerber. "I've been nagging the students all year to get away from the 'person unaffiliated with the University' description that keeps filtering into their copy, no doubt as a phrase from police logs. While the first day's story is pretty straightforward, the second story shows Miller coming back with the right questions."

The DPAA's Michael A. Silver Award recognizes top single piece of writing from the past year, and comes with a $500 prize.

This year's winner was Jessica Sidman '08, for "A Mural Miracle," a 34th Street Magazine article about a man who discovers his image on a wall in West Philadelphia.

[Click here to read the winning article in 34th Street]

The DP alumni judges for the Silver Award wereLuke DeCock '96, Raleigh News & Observer; Howard Gensler '83, Philadelphia Daily News; Andrea Ahles Koos '98, Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Madlen Read '04, Associated Press; and Adam Rubin '95, New York Daily News.

"It's a testament to Jessica's writing that the most lively, organic and humanity-filled entry was about a mural -- a static thing, a representation on a big, stone wall," commented Read. "She doesn't just recreate the now-destroyed mural for us; she tells us a story that both zooms in on the personalities of the two main characters and pans out to the larger context of Philadelphia's blighted-yet-hopeful neighborhoods. Jessica clearly spent a lot of time researching and listening to her sources, and she handles them well."