NSN Editor Jesse Abernathy proudly displays the first-place plaque he received for Best News Story in the South Dakota Newspaper Association’s Better Newspapers Contest. The award was presented during the 130th annual SDNA Convention, which was held at Cedar Shore Resort, Oacoma, April 27-28. PHOTO COURTESY/ARDIS MCRAE, NATIVE SUN NEWS
OACOMA, SOUTH DAKOTA –– Native Sun News won big in this year’s Better Newspapers Contest sponsored by the South Dakota Newspaper Association for excellence in journalism. The Rapid City-based weekly garnered three first-place awards. The winning first-place plaques and second- and third-place certificates were presented at Cedar Shore Resort at the conclusion of the SDNA’s annual two-day convention on April 28. This year marked the SDNA’s 130th convention. Out of the 17 news/editorial categories for which entries were submitted from issues published throughout 2011, NSN distinguished itself by placing in nine of them. Specific categories ranged from Best News Story to Best Feature Photo to Best Sports Column. Entries were judged by fellow journalists from the newspaper industry based on criteria including timeliness, writing style, subject matter, thoroughness, clarity, editorial vigor and readership impact. NSN competed against several other small newspapers from across South Dakota in the “Weeklies Over 2,000 Circulation” division. The awards for professional journalism reporting indicate to the staff of NSN that the newspaper is truly a newspaper in every sense of the word. Editor Jesse Abernathy and Health & Environment Editor Talli Nauman each secured a first-place award for NSN. Abernathy won in the Best News Story category for his investigative piece from last fall on the exclusion of South Dakota’s nine Native American reservations from the state’s official unemployment reporting data, while Nauman won in the Best News Series category for her in-depth coverage last fall and winter of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and its impact on the Pine Ridge Reservation. NSN writers as a whole secured the third first-place award for Best Headline Writing. Joseph Budd, sports correspondent, won a second-place Best Sports Column award for three separate pieces he wrote on the Native American struggle to succeed in college sports, Olympic gold medalist and Pine Ridge native Billy Mills, and Golden Gloves boxing and the role Native American women have taken in the event as a whole. Abernathy also received a second-place award for Best Feature Photo and took third place for Best Feature Story as well as for Best Overall Typography and Design, which is presented by the association to each respective paper’s editor and/or publisher. In all, he scored four awards. A mid-September photo of the larger-than-life granite bust of Mount Rushmore’s President George Washington as seen through the spires of one of the tipis at the memorial’s Heritage Village exhibit helped Abernathy gain second place, and an article from November on the school-to-prison pipeline theory and its plausible effects on Native American students within Rapid City Area Schools District helped him claim third place. NSN also received second- and third-place certificates for Best Special Issue and Best Editorial Writing, respectively. The special Veteran’s Day issue, “Honoring Our Akicita/Warriors,” secured second place, and an Op-Ed piece written by NSN’s editorial board about the need for the Lakota Nation Invitational’s board of directors to restructure the annual winter sporting event to better suit fans and competing teams secured third place. Almost all of the weekly’s staff was in attendance for the convention, as were several family members as guests. Additionally, retired NSN founder Tim Giago made a special appearance at the convention in a show of support. This was the first year NSN entered the competition, and the new president of the SDNA, Charlie Najacht, said of NSN, “This newspaper looks very much like an up-and-coming newspaper.” (Contact Jesse Abernathy at editor@nsweekly.com)
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