Earlier this month, the Associated Collegiate Press recognized The Daily Californian as one of the top college newspapers in the country, awarding the paper its highest honor for online student publications for the first time in the paper’s history.
The Daily Cal was one of six winners for the Online Pacemaker award for newspapers at colleges with more than 20,000 enrollment. The winners were announced at the organization’s annual conference at the Sheraton hotel in Chicago on Nov. 3. The paper was also one of 10 finalists for the Newspaper Pacemaker award for four-year college daily newspapers.
Winning the Online Pacemaker would not have been possible without the dedication of our talented online team — namely online manager Karoun Kasraie, senior web designer Persia Salehi and former-online managing editor Javier Panzar — whose efforts have been essential to the redesign of the Daily Cal site and without which we would not have won this award. We would also like to recognize 2010-11 editor in chief and president Rajesh Srinivasan and former designer Katherine Maslyn who initiated the redesign of the site in spring 2011 and the switch to WordPress as our content management system.
The staff also won first place for Multimedia Feature of the Year for last fall’s Dream State, a project that examined the role of California’s DREAM Act on the UC Berkeley campus and told the stories of students most affected by it. Panzar, former university news editor Jordan Bach-Lombardo and current online managing editor Kelly Fang spearheaded the project and led a collaborative effort between multimedia producers, news reporters and web developers and designers to produce a web page with exclusive written, illustrated and video content about the DREAM Act.
This semester we launched our first online-only special issue, Cal on the Frontlines — the Tech & Ideas issue — which we hope will set a precedent for future online specials and projects. We also created exclusive pages for football Gameday content and 2012 Elections coverage.
Still, our digital efforts are ongoing, as we continually seek to improve the online experience of the Daily Cal for readers. Looking forward, we will be rolling out entirely new designs for sectional pages as well as a more dynamic homepage and a new blog design. We are also planning more multimedia projects similar to Dream State.
As an independent, student-run newspaper, we pride ourselves on continually creating exceptional content all while serving the student body and surrounding community, but we cannot do it without your support. One way you can contribute to the student staff of the Daily Cal is by making a tax-deductible donation to help us continue to grow and produce award-winning content.
We appreciate your support and encourage you to share your thoughts by emailing me at [email protected].
