The Brooklyn Paper has picked up a new bucketful of new honors from a major national newspaper association.
On Friday, the Suburban Newspapers of America awarded The Paper one more first-place prize, plus two second places, a third place and two honorable mentions in its annual editorial contest.
Editor Gersh Kuntzman won the top prize in the “Best Arts and Entertainment Feature” category for his unforgettable December, 2009, story on vegetarian novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. Kuntzman won the same award last year for his 2008 profile of comic John Hodgman.
“Perhaps I will start believing the self-aggrandizing hype that I put in my press releases,” Kuntzman said in a statement on Friday.
The second place awards this year came for a great headline (“A salt on Borough Hall”) and best non-page–one layout (for our Go Brooklyn section, designed by Leah Mitch).
The Paper won third place in the “Best in-depth reporting” category for its coverage of last summer’s federal goose massacre, and earned the honorable mentions for best editorial writing and for best continuing coverage for its “Meadows of Shame” coverage of problems in city parks.
The Friday good news came on the heels of the SNA’s announcement in January that then-Brooklyn Paper reporter Stephen Brown had been voted Journalist of the Year, and Kuntzman was handed third place for Editor of the Year, an award he won outright in 2007.
Brown “proves that news can be informative and entertaining,” according to the judges in the nationwide contest, in which Brown beat out hundreds of seasoned scribes.
The Suburban Newspapers of America is a trade group whose members have a combined circulation of 22 million. The SNA represents more than 2,400 daily and weekly newspapers in both suburban and urban community markets across the country.
