Tomorrow, Thursday, September 21, some of our staff will head down to Denver for the Annual Colorado Press Association convention and awards. More will head down for individual days Friday and Saturday. And one of several of our staff will attend the awards on Saturday.
We are honored this year to be a sponsor of the College Sessions & Awards. This is exceptionally exciting for me as our Junior Journalist program is in its 7th year at The Mountain-Ear. We started with college interns all those years ago. Now we have college and high school interns. I have this theory that the younger you get people involved in journalism, the brighter the future will be for sharing our kind of news. Community news, hyper-local, focused on the Peak to Peak region.
On Friday, June 9, 2023, The Mountain-Ear received notification that we have seven awards coming at the convention. The winners of the awards are Christopher Kelley, Dave Gibson, John MacKay, Aya Pelkum Donahue and Annika Marschke. The awards can be any place and the recipients will receive the awards at the conference in September. These awards are for our work in 2022.
I want to take this moment to share how incredible it is to be part of this amazing team. The strides we have made in my 16 years on board, and specifically in the last couple of years, have been incredible. We are changing and growing as a team. We work together. We work towards a common goal. We help each other.
This year, with the addition of six full-time and six part-time staff, we are changing even more. We have a consistency that was missing a bit. We also have our 36 contributors (most paid) that are evolving with us. We have regular columns, top-coverage government reporting, features, schools, events and more. I’m so proud of all of our team and especially proud of all of these amazing people for what they have accomplished.
Christopher Kelley has brought our coverage to a new level. He covers all of our Nederland government, covers events, features, and investigative journalism.
John MacKay writes our Mountain Folk Tales, some humor columns, and some serious columns.
Dave Gibson is an incredible photographer and journalist and covers sports, features, and events.
Both of our interns who won are incredible journalists already. Aya is a junior and Annika is a sophomore. Both are back for the 2023-2024 school year. We currently have nine interns: six are high school students, two are college students, and one is a gap year student who graduated this past May.
It’s an exciting time to be part of this incredible newspaper. I can’t wait to see what the awards bring. And I can’t wait to see what the next year will bring.
Thank you, all of you, for your hard work and dedication to the newspaper. You ARE The Mountain-Ear!
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