Dear Journal readers,
We are just back from Springfield and wanted to report that central Illinois is as lovely as ever, and that Wednesday Journal received the sweepstakes trophy as the best weekly in our circulation division from the Illinois Press Association.
This is a terrific honor and we are delighted to have won it. The sweepstakes concept in the annual IPA awards is that the paper with the most overall points in nearly 40 editorial categories takes the trophy. So it was the accumulation of awards for Viewpoints and columnists and editorial cartoons and reporting and photography and design and sports coverage and our website that won us the Eva and Harold White Trophy. (The Whites were the founders of the Naperville Sun way back when Naperville was a country town.)
Our other weeklies — Austin Weekly News, Forest Park Review, Riverside-Brookfield Landmark and Chicago Journal/Skyline — also won a batch of awards. Most notably, the Review took General Excellence in the small-circulation category.
Other things we’re proud of from this year’s awards are:
- OakPark.com, our still new and always improving website, took second place in the Web category. Way to go Graham Johnston, Mike Risher, Evan O’Brien, Sandi Pedersen and everyone else who has played a key role on this project. OakPark.com is a site we have built in house, from the ground up. That makes this a gratifying win.
- Jason Geil, the staff photographer for all our papers, won a batch of honors including four first-place nods.
- Our Viewpoints section, and Marty Stempniak, its now former editor, took top editorial section honors. We are extraordinarily proud of this section and the vibrant forum it has provided over three decades.
- The Austin Weekly News won the trifecta in Original Columns, taking all three prizes. Congratulations to Arlene Jones, China Hill and Terry Dean, better known to you as our Oak Park education reporter. Terry is also widely respected on the West Side as editor of the Weekly.
Congratulations also to our competitors at Pioneer Press, where our former colleague Bill Dwyer won two first-place awards for some hard-nosed reporting. And we also note that John Barron, an Oak Park guy and the publisher of the Sun-Times, was elected this year’s president of the Illinois Press Association.
These are some remarkable days in the journalism business. We say thanks to you for turning to Wednesday Journal and OakPark.com as your essential connections to Oak Park and River Forest. Our circulation is strong, our Web traffic is flying and advertising is on the rise.
We’re going to keep working hard and enjoying the work we do.
Again, our thanks.
Dan Haley
Publisher, Wednesday Journal Inc.
