This past weekend, November 15-18, eight students traveled to San Antonio, Texas for the JEA/NSPA National Journalism Conference, and came home with three awards.

First of all, The LH received a Pacemaker award, which is awarded to the top 22 publications in the country. The Little Hawk then went on to place 1st in the Best of Show for newspapers with 17+ pages, and the website placed 5th in the Best of Show competition for small schools.

“We really wanted it, but I never thought we would actually get it,” Renata Stewart, Co-Executive Editor of The Little Hawk said.

This award recognizes the work from this past school year, or the 2011-2012 school year.

“It’s still a little surreal,” Stewart said. “It’s something that was always a goal, and is now justification and more for all of the late nights we have put in and the hard work we’ve done.”

The LH also received the Best in Show award, where the second issue of this school year was submitted. Stewart believes that this issue showed a continuation of last year’s work.

“We cleaned up the design a lot first,” Stewart said. “Once you get past that, we covered really important issues in a way that was unexpected and that gave the students a new insight into things they didn’t know about before.” Stewart also believes that the implementation of a magazine within the paper, and a bigger emphasis on error correction were beneficial to the paper’s success.

“The features magazine allows for more in-depth stories, and a big push to eliminate errors helps us gain a lot more credibility and respect from people,” Stewart said.

In addition to these two awards, the LH website also won fifth place in the Best of Show competition.

“It’s a staggering achievement given the small window of time we’ve had to work on our new theme,” Nat Alder, Co-Online Editor said.

The LH online site changed to a new theme at the beginning of last week, and the website was then judged at the end of that week.

“We had to reformat a lot of the photos, and customize the theme to fit our method of uploading stories,” Alder said. “It was a bit stressful, but it was worth it in the end.”

Alder believes that with more time, the website will be able to achieve even higher.

“I can only imagine how it will look in six months for the next competition.”