Miami Dade College’s (MDC) award-winning newspaper, The Reporter, has been named the top college student newspaper in Florida for the eighth year in a row during the recent Florida College System Publications Association (FCSPA) conference and awards banquet in Tampa.
The biweekly’s staff placed in 17 of 19 individual categories including 10 first-place awards. The competition was based on newspapers printed during the 2017-18 school year. The Reporter accumulated 38 overall points.
Aside from placing first overall in general excellence, the newspaper was awarded individual top honors for Arts Review, Feature Photo, Picture Story, Humor Column, Sports Column, General Column, Illustration, Comic Strip, Design and Website. In addition, two Reporter students — Katherine Wallace-Fernandez and Sebastián Ballestas — won inner circle awards for placing top three in three different categories.
“Every year, The Reporter jumpstarts the career of young journalists who work day and night to inform the college community,” said Wallace-Fernandez, who served as editor-in-chief of The Reporter in 2018. “Winning top state college paper is proof of our staff’s hard work.”
The Reporter features 16 pages, prints on a biweekly schedule, has a circulation of 10,250 per print cycle and is supplemented by a website with video and audio content. It is distributed at all eight MDC campuses and has newsrooms at the North, Wolfson and Kendall campuses. In the past eight years, the paper has won 117 awards from the FCSPA including 68 first-place honors.
At FCSPA’s award ceremony, Axis Creative Arts Magazine, Volume 15, dominated the 2018 competition among literary college publications in the B Division, winning General Excellence First Place. Axis also won a Pacemaker from the Associated Collegiate Press, a First Place Pinnacle Award from College Media Association, an Inner Circle Award (conferred to student Jerel Ramsey) and a Gold Crown Awards from Columbia Scholastic Press, making it the magazine’s most award-winning issue to date. Axis is published once a year during the spring semester and released the following fall, free of charge.
Below a list of the individual awards received by The Reporter and Axis:
The Reporter:
First place:
Ciro Salcedo, Arts Review
Sebastián Ballestas, Feature Photo
Omar Negrin, Sebastián Ballestas and John Penagos, Picture Story
Justin Marcano, Humor Column
Giovanni Del Fa, Sports Column
Teresa Schuster, General Column
Aminah Brown, Illustration
Melanie Castro, Comic Strip
Tetyana Shumkova and Agustin Toriz, Design
Staff, Website
Second place:
Corbin Bolies, Editorial
Katherine Wallace-Fernandez, Headlines
Omar Negrin, Sports Photo
Sebastián Ballestas, News Photos
Third place:
Katherine Wallace-Fernandez, In-Depth Reporting
Katherine Wallace-Fernandez, Feature Story
Darian Vega, Sports Writing
Axis:
First place:
Maria Jose Grogg, Joshua Buron and Momo Manalang, Poetry
Pedro Lazaro, Quentin Gibson-Mays and Rafael Lucas, Art Works
Jerel Ramsey, Contents Page
Second place:
Jerel Ramsey, Roderique Julien, Cover
Jerel Ramsey, Amaris Quintero, Miguel Cardenas and Savanah Sanchez, Design
Jerel Ramsey, Two-Page Spread Design
Third place:
Roderique Julien, Photo
For more information, please contact The Reporter’s advisor Manolo Barco at 305-237-1255, mbarco@mdc.edu. For Axis magazine, contact Carmen Bucher at cbucher@mdc.edu; Kathleen Noonan, knoonan@mdc.edu.
