Democrat-Gazette takes 22 first-place awards

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Log Cabin Democrat and the Batesville Daily Guard won the sweepstakes awards in their respective divisions in the 2014 Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors contest.

Those and other awards recognizing last year's best journalistic efforts were announced Saturday afternoon at the Arkansas APME's annual meeting, which took place in Hot Springs. The contest was judged by members of The Associated Press in Colorado.

The Democrat-Gazette won 22 first-place awards and swept three categories: beat reporting, digital storytelling and feature photo.

The sweepstakes winners in each of the contest's three divisions -- small, medium and large dailies -- were determined by how many awards a newspaper won across the contest's 28 categories.

The Daily Guard and the Log Cabin Democrat also received their division's general excellence awards. The Texarkana Gazette was honored with that award in the large-newspaper division.

In addition to sweeping the feature photo category, the Democrat-Gazette's photographers also took first place in all their categories. Benjamin Krain won first place in feature photo and spot sports photo. Other first-place winners were Stephen Thornton in feature sports photo, Staton Breidenthal in portfolio and Melissa Sue Gerrits in spot news.

The Democrat-Gazette's Conway bureau chief, Debra Hale-Shelton, won first place in the beat-reporting category with her stories about a Faulkner County judge. The winning digital storytelling entry was on last year's tornado in Mayflower and Vilonia.

Tornado coverage also led to first-place awards in news coverage by the staff and for spot news by Chad Day and Claudia Lauer, now a reporter with the AP.

Chelsea Boozer, Little Rock government reporter, received the Service to the FOI award for her use of the state's Freedom of Information Act in covering a local housing agency.

The Arkansas AP also gave its annual Mark Twain Award for cooperation to the Democrat-Gazette.

A Section on 04/26/2015

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