PLU Student-led Newspaper wins Mark of Excellence Awards

Earlier this spring, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) announced the winners of the Mark of Excellence Award (MOE). The Mast, PLU’s student-led newspaper, won one of the entries and got to the final round in two other entries! As Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of The Mast, my first thought was — we deserved this.

SPJ is an American journalism organization dedicated to encouraging ethical, high-standard journalism writing. Professionals, students, and college newspapers can be SPJ members, and participate in trainings, conferences, and awards. PLU falls into Region 10 for the MOE which consists of colleges and universities in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon.

The Mast has been a member and active participant of SPJ for a long time, but this is our first win in a few years. It wasn’t an easy choice to pick several articles and design works to submit for the MOE. We could choose from everything we printed and published online through 2024, and there were many strong articles we wanted to highlight.

At the end of January, our upper-management gathered for a meeting and made a tough choice: we submitted five entries to the MOE. Later in April, we learned the great news: two of the five entries qualified as finalists and one won!

The Mast staff qualified as a finalist for the Corbin Gwaltney Award for Best All-Around Student Newspaper (Small) entry. We submitted three issues that were published under Sarah’s (Deputy EIC) and my supervision, and one from last academic year when we had different EICs. Those were considered for excellence of articles, variety, design, photos, and layout. To know that our team’s hard work has been recognized on a regional level makes my heart bloom with pride. Now, our newspaper is considered the second best among small universities (less than 10,000 people) in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon for 2024.

The Mast also qualified as a finalist for the Illustration entry. Our team submitted our newly introduced Mast-cot, a newspaper salmon, designed by a first-year PLU student Aurora Gregorich. Gregorich is majoring in Art & Design and is excited to participate in the MOE again sometime in the future. She shared, “Our MAST-cot began as a little dream to put a fishy face to the paper, and I’m so proud to see how far it’s already come!”

Finally, The Mast won the Arts/Entertainment/Fashion Journalism entry. A second-year reportert, Dailyn Cooks, majoring in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies, wrote the winning “Leopard Print: A Timeless Pattern in Every Generation’s Closet”. Cooks shared that she felt “incredibly honored to have made it as a finalist.” Cooks is a consistent writer for The Mast Arts & Culture section: “I think one of the biggest things I value is making culture accessible to everyone. To be able to share my love of fashion with those outside of those spaces and niches has been really awesome.”

Being a part of SPJ and participating in the MOE means first and foremost that The Mast produces high quality articles. It also means that we have a team that is willing to put a great effort into providing PLU with important updates and investigations. Finally, it means that Cooks’ Leopard Print article is going to compete on a national level!