The DePaulia continues to be an award-winning paper. Our staff came back from Washington D.C. touting markers of our hard work in the form of individual and team awards.

With newspapers in hand, editors from La DePaulia and The DePaulia traveled to our nation’s capital for MediaFest22, a national conference for all things journalism hosted by the Society of Professional Journalists.

Our editors attended conference sessions to learn about breaking news, designing newspaper spreads and interviewing vulnerable sources. Staff members listened to keynote speeches by legendary Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, we networked with fellow reporters and submitted our work for awards.

The DePaulia and La DePaulia won five College Media Association Pinnacle Awards, two Associated College Press Pacemaker Awards and were named the Best of Show Newspaper/Newsmagazine out of all four-year colleges with more than 15,000 students in the U.S. That’s a big deal!

To wrap up the conference, I talked to the award-winning journalists at our paper to reflect on their work.

News editor Kiersten Riedford won the first place Pinnacle Award in Best Coverage of Faith for her article “Give us more: DePaul requires religion yet lacks interfaith classes, multiple religions not represented in classes.”

The article stemmed from Riedford noticing limited availability for certain religion courses at DePaul last year. She said after talking with several others, there was not a wide enough span of classes representing people of faith at DePaul.

“You’re sitting here and you’re telling me that [DePaul] only offered [three] Hinduism classes, seven Buddhist classes, seven general Christianity classes and over [130] Catholicism classes?” Riedford said.

Because religion is a required course dimension for DePaul students, Riedford questioned the diversity of courses offered.

“There’s so many other religions that are represented in the DePaul community and it’s like,

where are they in the classes?” Riedford said.

After her article was published last year, several members of the university penned their own articles in response, including former president Father Dennis H. Holtschneider. Riedford did not expect her opinion to start a conversation in the DePaul community, especially as a freshman.

“I was asking myself ‘Did I do something wrong, or did I do something right to the point where people were responding?’” Riedford said. “It was my first real experience in the sense of what it means to be a journalist that actually puts things into the open.”

To win the top prize at the Pinnacle Awards was affirming for Riedford.

“It was the realization of like, holy cow, okay, maybe this is what I’m meant to be doing,” Riedford said.

Lawrence Kreymer, former editor-in-chief of The DePaulia, was the third-place Pinnacle Award winner in Best Sports Game Story for his article “Men’s basketball: Freeman-Liberty delivers special encore performance in final home game of the season.”

“It was against Marquette, DePaul’s biggest rival,” Kreymer said. “It was a pretty crazy game.”

A combination of factors made this story different from other sports game coverage Kreymer had done in the past. The conditions seemed serendipitous, with it being the last home game for graduating players, a big come-from-behind win and great energy from the players and coaches.

“That’s what probably made it a good story was that there was so much action,” Kreymer said.

Print managing editor Nadia Carolina Hernandez’s story “DePaul counseling services outsourced to a third-party app, leaving students in limbo” won a third place Pinnacle Award in Best General News Story.

Hernandez began reporting about DePaul’s decreased in-person counseling support because she felt it was a topic that needed to be talked about.

“I kind of knew that there was something that had to be done about it,” Hernandez said. “The situation, in my opinion, was just so unusual for this private university who has this huge endowment to come back from a year of isolation to not have these student services already lined up.”

After her article came out, community members at DePaul started a wider conversation about student support at the university, leading to a redesign of counseling services at DePaul.

“I never really did it with this idea that it was going to come out as this huge thing,” Hernandez said. “But I’m glad I helped people. That’s really the most I could have asked for.”

Hernandez never wrote the story in hopes of earning accolades. She reported on the counseling services crisis so that students could get the resources they needed and the problems could be resolved.

“[University Counseling & Psychological Services are] making progress on fixing some systemic issues that counseling underwent, but I hope when people see that award, that doesn’t mean […] I’m done with this,” said Hernandez.

Hernandez hopes that community members will continue to acknowledge what happened to counseling services at DePaul. She says the reporting is not over.

Several former and current staff members, including Nika Schoonover, Amber Stoutenborough, Hernandez and Riedford won an honorable mention Pinnacle Award in Best Special Section – More Than Four Pages for The DePaulia’s Gender Issue.

According to Schoonover, the former print managing editor of The DePaulia, The Gender Issue was planned far in advance.

“Last year, I wanted to do some type of special issue every quarter we had,” Schoonover said. “We had the basketball issue in the fall, so in the winter, I really wanted to do The Gender Issue because that’s something the staff was excited about and was talking about.”

The idea for the issue was born out of staff conversations about identity and gender. At first, the special issue was going to be about women specifically, but it slowly expanded to encapsulate all different perspectives about gender.

“I don’t think our issue would have been as successful as it was if we didn’t include the overarching idea of gender and not just women,” Hernandez said.

Nonbinary people, men and women told their stories about how their gender played a role in their lives.

“All the pieces were diverse and the writing was impeccable and I thought that visually it was beautiful,” Schoonover said.

Stoutenborough said that she would go into the office every day to work on the issue with Schoonover, Hernandez and Riedford. They produced the issue amid limited support, long days and the stress of finals during Winter Quarter.

“I think it just shows that like for our first ever special issue, the fact that it was even nominated during finals week and all of his other stuff was happening, that if we wanted to do this again, we can and it will be even better than before,” Stoutenborough said.

Editor-in-chief Erik Uebelacker won a Pacemaker Finalist Award in Best Story: Column for his article “I joined Truth Social so you don’t have to.”

Uebelacker said that he went on former president Donald Trump’s social media app Truth Social every day for a week to write his story.

In order to immerse himself in the world of Truth Social, Uebelacker said that he restricted himself to only using the app’s features to write the story. Because Truth Social didn’t have DMs, he had to communicate by replying to other users’ posts. 

“It was really easy to write because it was a lot of fun,” Uebelacker said. “It was all kind of first person and I like writing like that so writing it didn’t take very long.”

Schoonover said that it was the style and the angle that made the opinion great.

“I think Truth Social was just kind of quirky and kind of fun,” said Schoonover. “It was unique because no one was really joining it; like no students are really doing the thing where they’re joining it and writing about it.”

In addition to individual awards, The DePaulia and La DePaulia were honored with staff-wide recognition including Best of Show in the nation and a Pacemaker Finalist Award for Best Newspaper.

Schoonover said that the awards are a testament to the drive of student journalists at the paper. Despite having limited resources compared to other universities, The DePaulia and La DePaulia produce work that gets national recognition.

“I think DePaul’s journalism program is really great at making great journalists and I think that The DePaulia has so many of those on staff,” Schoonover said. “And, you know, we are a smaller staff. We don’t have a lot of the resources and the personnel that a lot of these other publications do.”

Hernandez said that the awards affirmed the hard work created in the office.

“I think it also just kind of reaffirms our passion for everything because we were doing this issue and like the idea of an award wasn’t on our minds,” Hernandez said. “It was about putting together something we could be proud of.”

For some staff members, the hard work and the opportunity to produce meaningful journalism drew them to join the paper.

“I think something that’s really cool is being able to win and knowing that you did something well, because a large part of why I came to DePaul as opposed to going to a different school was because I was given the opportunity to do something big here,” Riedford said.

Congratulations to The DePaulia and La DePaulia. Stay tuned for more high-level student journalism and meaningful reporting.