The Goshen College Record received 14 awards from the Indiana Collegiate Press Association, including first-place finishes for articles about trayless dining in the cafeteria and a champion snow skier who ended up on a very flat campus.
Among smaller colleges across the state, the Record also received third place in the newspaper-of-the-year category for 2008.
Paul Boers, a senior and co-editor of the feature page this semester, received two first-place awards: best sports feature, with a profile of the skier, Dusty Diller; and best news feature, about a soldier-turned-pacifist.
Diller, a senior and former Junior Olympian from Colorado Springs, Colo., is featured on a YouTube video skiing off a 60-foot cliff into nine feet of powder. Why choose Goshen College? Boers notes that Diller came for a stronger sense of community (and to study film).
Sheldon Good, a senior and editor of the Record this semester, took first place in non-deadline news reporting for a piece on the effort to save waste and food by removing trays from the cafeteria.
An unofficial action preceded Sodexo's formal policy change. Good wrote, "Last spring Goshen College students pranked the campus and stole all of the cafeteria's trays for a few days. It was the talk of the student body. This fall trayless dining is once again the talk of the campus. But this time, the lack of trays is no prank."
The Record also received second-place awards for best sports feature (Matt Harms), best staff editorial (Emily Dougherty) and best informational graphic (Hilary Watson).
Staff members took third-place awards for best editorial cartoon (Michael Neumann), best news or feature series (Julie Weirich), best front page, best pullout section (Reporting for the Public Good class), best sports news story (Marlys Weaver), best news feature (Marlys Weaver) and best staff editorial (Elizabeth Beachy).
The awards cover the 2008 calendar year, during which Emily Dougherty (whose winning editorial focused on inclusive language), a senior, and James Weber, a 2008 alumnus, served as editors.
Goshen College competes in Division III, which includes nondaily newspapers published at schools with enrollments of 2,000 or fewer full-time students.
