Sophie LeMay and Jen Clancey were honored recently with state and national awards in the annual National Federation of Press Women contest.
TheReportingProject.org reporters each won first-place awards in the organization’s statewide contest, which propelled their entries to the national contest. National awards were presented last month during NFPW’s national conference in Cincinnati.
LeMay won a first-place award in the business category and second in the agriculture reporting category in the state contest. The business story is about a newspaper called The Budget, which serves Amish communities across the world. The agriculture story is about Lynd Fruit Farm and development pressures on agriculture in Licking County.
Her story about the newspaper, which was founded in 1890 and hasn’t changed much since then, won first place in the national contest.
Clancey won first place in the state contest and third place in the national contest for her story about a college professor and his students who are doing stream-water quality analysis to assess any changes that occur in Licking County waterways as agriculture gives way to development.
LeMay is a rising senior at Denison University. Clancey graduated from Denison in May and is a digital producer for Explore Big Sky, an online news organization in Montana.
“It’s wonderful to watch students develop into incredible journalists,” said Jack Shuler, director of the Denison Journalism Program and a member of The Reporting Project team. “It’s the greatest part of the work we do. Sophie’s and Jen’s journalism would not have happened without the support and direction of their incredible mentors, Doug Swift and Alan Miller,” of the Denison journalism faculty.
Shuler said that “the awards are not only the recognition of Jen’s and Sophie’s skills, but also of the larger impact of The Reporting Project in this community.”
TheReportingProject.org is the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s journalism program, which is sponsored in part by the Mellon Foundation. The news organization is staffed by student interns and journalism faculty, and its primary focus is news about people and places in Licking County, where Denison University is located. All stories produced by The Reporting Project team are available free to any news organization that wishes to publish them with credit to the authors and TheReportingProject.org. In the past year, more than 70 Reporting Project stories have been published by news organizations in Ohio and beyond.
You can invest in the future of local journalism with a donation to The Reporting Project.