Newsroom

CORVALLIS - The Society of Professional Journalists has named the Oregon State University student newspaper, the Daily Barometer, the best all-around daily student newspaper in the country.

The announcement was made Saturday afternoon at the Mark of Excellence Awards Banquet, part of the organization's national convention in Fort Worth, Texas. Other finalists for the award included the Daily Texan at the University of Texas at Austin, the Daily Lantern at Ohio State University and the Rocky Mountain Collegian at Colorado State University. All four newspapers qualified through regional competition, with the Daily Barometer winning Region XII, which consists of college newspapers in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska.

"This is absolutely incredible," said Frank Ragulsky, OSU's student media adviser. "When you consider the universities that we were competing against all have huge journalism schools and large annual budgets, it's really a testament to the abilities of our students."

OSU eliminated technical journalism at the school in the early 1990s following state budget cuts. Prior to the cuts, the Daily Barometer was often a regional winner but was never named among the national finalists. For the past 11 years, the newspaper has operated without the benefit of an academic major.

In addition to winning the award for best daily newspaper, Oregon State University reporter Matt LaPlante also won the top award for feature writing. His five-part series, "Five Hearts" chronicled the story of two lesbian mothers who were having triplets. LaPlante followed the two women through six months of pregnancy and the weeks after delivery.

"I'm really proud of both of these awards," said LaPlante, who now works as a reporter at the McMinnville News-Register.

LaPlante was the staff development editor for the Daily Barometer during the time the newspaper was judged in the SPJ competition.

"We had a terrific staff," LaPlante said. "It was a group that arrived at school with no ambition to go into journalism. But there was something about that group and the talent at that time that allowed us to do something special. When we look back on this, we'll say we were really fortunate."

LaPlante said former editors Katie Pesznecker, Scott Johnson, and Troy Foster, sports editor Andrew Hinkleman and writers DeAnn Welker, Jake Ten Pas, and Jenny Nelson were part of the core group that helped transform the Daily Barometer into an award-winning newspaper.

Pesznecker is now writing for the Anchorage Daily News while Johnson is a copy editor at the paper. Foster is the news editor at the Madras Pioneer while Welker is the night news editor for the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. Hinkleman works for the Associated Press covering sports, Ten Pas is copy editor at the Corvallis Gazette-Times and Nelson is finishing school at Portland State University.

Despite OSU's lack of a large annual budget and the presence of a journalism school, the Daily Barometer won its awards in the face of stiff competition.

"This was probably the most competitive Mark of Excellence contest so far," said Guy Baehr, chairman of SPJ's Awards and Honors Committee. "Total entries increased by almost a third over last year. We expected some increase with the addition of nine new online categories, but in fact, most of the almost 700 additional entries were in categories other than online."

Before reaching the national competition, students placed first in SPJ's regional competitions, which were judged this past spring. Competitors in the Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper competition were judged on issues from March 3, Oct. 7 and Dec. 7 of 2001.

This year's competition drew more than 2,700 entries in 45 categories for print, radio, television and online collegiate journalism.

"The Mark of Excellence competition represents some of the finest examples of collegiate print, broadcast and photojournalism in the country," said SPJ Vice President for Campus Chapter Affairs Jim Highland, director of print journalism at Western Kentucky University.