Newspaper Wins Top Honor

NORTH LITTLE ROCK — The Washington County Enterprise-Leader won top honors for General Excellence among smaller weeklies during the Arkansas Press Association Super Convention held at North Little Rock on Saturday.

The 2014 APA editorial contest, a highlight of the summer convention, attracted 1,874 entries, including 830 from 20 dailies and 1,044 from 33 weeklies. The Colorado Press Association judged the contest.

According to an APA press release, the award for general excellence is the most prestigious award from the APA, and the competition was fierce. The press release posted on the APA website also stated “the entries, in categories based on size, represented some major effort on often very young staffs who are devoted to print,” and continued “Special sections from newspapers around the state, generally the collaborative work of the whole newspaper

staff, filled a whole table at the Super Convention.”

The Enterprise- Leader won first place in the Special Section category for a November “Protect and Serve” issue honoring veterans and first responders. Among staff awards: Lynn Kutter won first place for best single news photograph, “Park revisits Civil War History,” at Prairie Grove Battlefield and won or shared nine awards total.

Pat Harris won first place for news and political columns with “Living with autism.”

Mark Humphrey won first place for best sports feature story, “Parental pressure to perform,” and first place in picture page/photo essay “Buzzer-Beating 3-Pointer,” showing a sequence of photos when Prairie Grove’s McKay Gregson hit a second-chance shot at the end of a rivalry basketball game against Farmington when Cardinal Jeremy Mueller rebounded his first shot, which missed, and thew the ball back to him.

In freelance writing, the Enterprise- Leader’s Ben Madrid won first place for “Numbers, Statistics and Banners,” a column written as a tribute to the late Coach Mike Green, of Prairie Grove.

Harris and Kutter won first place for coverage of Business/Agriculture.

In all, the Enterprise-Leader received eight first place awards.