IU student media takes top honors at ICPA Awards, SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards
IU Student Media took top honors at the Indiana Collegiate Press Association’s annual awards luncheon Saturday, April 7 on the Indiana University-Purdue University campus in Indianapolis. Additionally, students in Gerry Lanosga’s investigative reporting class won first place in online in-depth reporting in Region 5 at the SPJ 2017 Mark of Excellence Awards.
At the ICPA awards luncheon, the Indiana Daily Student was recognized as both the Division 1 Newspaper of the Year and Advertising Publication of the Year. Idsnews.com received Online Publication of the Year honors. And the Arbutus Yearbook was recognized as the Division 1 Yearbook of the Year.
Students from IU also received more than 130 individual awards for excellence in multimedia, social media, writing, photography, advertising and news design categories. ICPA represents more than three dozen student media organizations at Indiana colleges and universities.
Senior Carley Lanich was named the Brook Baker Student Journalist of the Year at the event. The award is named for Baker, a reporter and editor at the Trailblazer newspaper at Vincennes University who was killed in 1997. The award honors her memory and her journalistic commitment and courage.
Five students from across Indiana were nominated this year. The judge was Lynne Perri, Managing Editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and Journalist-in-Residence at the School of Communication at American University.
Perri noted Lanich’s persistence in her reporting on a four-part project called “The system,” which published as a web build-out and 12-page special section in the IDS in September 2017. The series examined IU’s system for investigating student reports of sexual assault.
Lanich reported on the story for more than a year.
“Her work on this series is easily the most impressive investigative reporting I’ve ever seen in my decades of following IU’s student journalists,” said Tom French, IU Riley Endowed Chair in Journalism and Professor of Practice, in one of Lanich’s nomination letters.
Lanich and her reporting teammates, Nicole McPheeters, Emily Miles and Eman Mozaffar, were also recognized for the Best Special Presentation for “The system’s” web build-out from ICPA.
“Camp fever: Injuries, illnesses missing from Indiana state records,” an eight-part series that explored the lack of injury reporting from Indiana camps, won Lanosga’s investigative reporting class their first place at the SPJ 2017 Mark of Excellence Awards. Lanich and her team were finalists in the same category with their work on “The system.”