Citizen brings home journalism awards

LITTLE ROCK -- The Lovely County Citizen and its sister newspaper, the Carroll County News based in Berryville, picked up nine statewide journalism awards on Saturday at the Arkansas Press Association's Better Newspaper Editorial Contest awards banquet.

The Citizen itself brought home four awards, competing against other weeklies with similar size circulations.

Interim editor and longtime writer there C.D. White won second place in the Editorial category for the article "Of Walmart stores and violins."

Cartoonist Wolf Grulkey won third place in Editorial Cartoonist Portfolio, competing against all dailies and weeklies of all sizes in the state.

White won an Honorable Mention prize in the News Story category for an article titled "Broken gas line."

And the staff as a whole won an Honorable Mention in the Community Coverage category.

The awards included one first-place nod, going to former Carroll County News managing editor Linda Caldwell for her column "Angels among us," which opined the loss of an ex-husband in the Joplin tornado last year. It took the top prize in the General Interest Column category, competing against other weekly newspapers with similar size circulation.

Caldwell now serves as director of the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow.

"I am very proud of and grateful for the recognition from our peers in the journalism industry that we have received this weekend," said Publisher Bob Moore. "With all the staff changes we have undergone at both papers recently, and the improvements in both editorial content and design that we've been working on, I look forward to even bigger things to come in the future, and even better-quality products for our readers both at Carroll County News and the Lovely County Citizen."