The Society of Professional Journalists’ Region 5 collegiate competition, the Mark of Excellence awards, this week announced winners for work completed in 2023, and TheStatehouseFile.com claimed five top spots.
Region 5 includes colleges and universities in Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. In most categories, The Statehouse File competed against schools with fewer than 10,000 students — Franklin College has fewer than 1,000. First-place finishers will now advance to the national competition.
The Statehouse File, a program of the Franklin College Pulliam School of Journalism, occupied both places in the category for breaking news reporting. Senior Jack Sells’ story about the Indiana Supreme Court allowing the state’s highly contested abortion ban to go into effect took first place. Junior Ashlyn Myers was a finalist for her story about a bill attempting to enshrine into law a set of rules around using service animals in public.
In the general news reporting category, The Statehouse File staff was named a finalist for an in-depth one-on-one conversation with Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch shortly after she announced her candidacy for governor. Working on the multimedia package were Myers, 2023 graduate Emma Smith, seniors Eric Mullinix and Xain Ballenger, junior John Asplund, and sophomore Erin Bruce.
2023 graduate Isaac Gleitz won for in-depth reporting for his examination of how differently Marion and Johnson counties approach public transit, with neither landing on a full solution to the problem.
And junior Sydney Byerly won the best use of multimedia category for her graphic “The Game of Voting,” which also recently claimed a spot in the Indiana Collegiate Press Association’s annual contest. Based on the board game Life, it walked potential voters through the deadlines and requirements to participate in the November 2023 election.
Last year, Gleitz and Byerly were part of a team that won the national SPJ MOE award in the general news category for a multi-part series about disgraced former college president Thomas Minar. Also on the team was 2023 graduate Alexa Shrake, now a reporter for Indiana Lawyer.
2023 graduate Taylor Wooten, now a reporter for Indianapolis Business Journal, also won a national SPJ MOE award last year, in the breaking news category, for her report on the emotional testimony surrounding a transgender athlete bill working through the General Assembly. Franklin College was one of just a handful of schools to win more than one national award, alongside such schools as Arizona State, Northwestern and Harvard universities.
The Statehouse File is a flagship immersive-learning program sending journalism majors to the Indiana Statehouse to cover state politics and publish their work with professional media partners around the state. The year-round online news outlet just finished its 18th legislative session.
