Lexington, Winchester and Hopkinsville win in SNPA

Three Kentucky newspapers were honored recently with five awards recognizing their excellence in literacy programs, Newspapers in Education and advertising.

The Lexington Herald-Leader was recognized for using its efforts to drive up sales while being named in the dealer category of the Newspaper Association of America’s 2002 Dandy Awards for excellence in automotive newspaper advertising.

The Herald-Leader won in the Best Ad Campaign by a Franchised New Car dealer category. The ad, “Invest Wisely/Zero Percent Interest,” was for Green’s Lincoln Mercury in Lexington.

Meanwhile, The Herald-Leader, Kentucky New Era and Winchester Sun were winners in the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association’s NIE and Literacy Awards. The awards were announced in Atlanta during the SNPA NIE conference Feb. 3-5. The awards are given annually to recognize excellence in NIE projects, literacy programs, and community service and literacy programming.

The Herald-Leader won first place in Best Literacy Idea among papers in the 75,000 to 150,000 circulation category for its leadership role in “Luke in a Really Big Pickle,” a serialized story for youngsters written by Kentucky authors and published in 43 Kentucky papers. More than 420,000 copies of each chapter were printed in newspapers of all sizes across the state each week for seven weeks. The project was co-sponsored by KPA, Kentucky Educational Television and LG&E Energy Foundation.

It was spearheaded by KPA’s Kentucky Network for Newspapers in Education. Kriss Johnson, KNNIE chairwoman, is educational outreach manager for The Herald-Leader.

LG&E Energy Foundation/KU agreed to sponsor special scrapbooks, available through participating newspapers. The scrapbooks allowed story readers to collect each chapter as it was printed. In the end, each reader had assembled a complete chapter book. The Herald-Leader printed 50,000 scrapbooks and helped distribute them throughout Kentucky.

The Herald-Leader also won a first-place award in the Best Community Service and Programming Concerning Literacy category for papers in the 75,000 to 150,000 circulation range.

The judges were impressed with the paper’s Family Involvement Literacy Project: Learning with the Lexington Herald-Leader at School and at Home.

After the Audit Bureau of Circulation established new rules that meant that NIE could count some newspapers in a NIE home-delivered category, The Herald-Leader’s Johnson took that as a challenge. She developed the Family Involvement program where students use a paper in the classroom and have a Sunday Herald-Leader delivered to their home weekly.

The program included an eight-page tab for students and teachers to use together to help introduce the newspaper components. In addition, there were 36 learning activities for teachers to send home weekly for students to do with parents and the Sunday newspaper.

The Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville won a first-place award for Best Community Service and Programming Concerning Literacy in the under 30,000 circulation category.

For more than a decade, The New Era has been one of the Christian County Literacy Council’s biggest boosters in its news, school and editorial pages.

The paper designed a series of pages to celebrate, illustrate and promote Literacy Week locally from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2.

One focus of the page was to help children collect pieces to a puzzle during the week. Completed puzzles qualified students for a drawing for a trip to Chicago to see Sue the Dinosaur, a character featured in a book read to all kindergarten through fifth-grade students by volunteers. Record numbers of students participated in the program.

The contest entry was submitted by editor David Riley. It was the second consecutive year in which The New Era has won a first-place award in the SNPA literacy contest.

The Winchester Sun won a first-place award in the Literacy News Articles or Editorials category in the under 30,000 circulation range.

According to a letter from SNPA executive director Edward VanHorn to publisher Betty Berryman, The Sun was a winner for the third year in a row in the SNPA Literacy Awards Program. This year's award was based on separate feature stories by former Sun reporter Jennifer Sciantarelli and Sun staffer Cathy Gilkey as well as a news story by summer intern Jamie Vinson covering a GED graduation.

All the stories were accompanied by photos by Sun photographer James Mann. Four literacy editorials also were included with the entry.