Hello There

Why, hello there. Would you like to read about some baseball? Some softball, perhaps? Or maybe some actual real, live news we reported... see? Sportswriters can do news too!

Also, our sports section won some awards. Our sports editor won an Illinois Associated Press Editors Association photo award for this photo taken at the state championship game last year. It was originally in color in the paper, I think.

We (the paper, not the sports section) also won some general awards for local news and such. I'd link you to it, to show everyone, but all the AP links I looked for have expired so you'll have to take my word for it.

Finally, our sports section DID win something, from the Southern Illinois Editorial Association, for best local sports coverage. (For some reason these particular awards did not have any individual sports categories this year.) We took third in the "small daily" division. First went to a St. Louis-area suburban paper (or, "Metro-East," if you'd like to know the technical term, thank you very much). Second went to one of our kinda-rivals with whom we share some overlapping coverage. Unfortunately, the SIEA has no website so I can't link to it to show you. But it exists. I swear.

We still have the regular Illinois Press Association awards next month, and I know we submitted a bunch to that. I dunno if we'll win a section award in that one, but I submitted quite a few individual ones, so who knows.

P.S.: Graduates, congratulations. Does anyone have any sweet jobs lined up that they can tell us about? I'm interested.