La Voz Weekly, De Anza College’s student newspaper, came back from the 2005 Journalism Association of Community Colleges NorCal convention with 27 awards, the most it has won since first entering the contests in 1968.
JACC was a day long event with workshops for writers, photographers, layout designers, cartoonists and other journalism positions. It was held at San Francisco State University on Oct. 22 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. At least 24 community colleges from Northern California entered their newspapers to the competition.
Mail-in awards were taken from the newspapers from the fall quarter of 2004 to the spring quarter of 2005. On-the-spot awards were contests at the convention that any La Voz staff member could enter.
In the mail-in section, La Voz won 24 awards and for on-the-spot, two more awards were gained.
The Web site, www.lavozdeanza.com, also won an award for General Excellence.
"I wasn’t surprised that we won because we already had a very good Web site. We have already made it even better with videos, and PDF images of the printed paper so people can see the exact designs and layouts if they wanted too," said Dan Sealana, online editor since winter 2004.
La Voz‘s Web site has been online for about five years.
"I’m very proud but I have to give the credit to the staff also. It wouldn’t have been possible without them giving me such good content," Sealana said.
First place awards include the following categories: editorial, front page design and sports action photo. The second place award is for column writing. Third place awards include the following categories: informational graphic, online photo and profile feature story. Fourth place awards are for inside page layout for tabloid, line illustration, online photo and sports game story.
Honorable mentions include the following categories: advertisement, critical review, editorial, editorial cartoon, line illustration, news story, opinion story, sports action photo and sports feature photo.
"The entire staff worked hard to put out the paper every week, and accomplishing that was enough of a reward. The recognition [at JACC] is simply a bonus," said Steven Cabana, last year’s editor-in-chief.
