Cardinal Alumnus Wins Second Pulitzer Prize
Walt Bogdanich honored for national reporting.
The New York Times won in the national reporting category for a series of articles by Walt Bogdanich about fatal accidents at railway crossings. It was the second Pulitzer for Mr. Bogdanich, who won in 1988 for articles he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.
2005 Daily Cardinal Alumni Awards
The winners of the Daily Cardinal Alumni Association are chosen by a committee of DCAA Board members and approved by the full DCAA board. The awards will be presented at our April 29, 2005 awards dinner in Madison. Congratulations to our 2005 winners:
Daily Cardinal Hall of Fame
This award is given to alumni who have made a major contribution to the history of The Daily Cardinal, and/or who have achieved significant renown in their chosen field. Past winners include Richard Leonard, Susan Davis, Leona Schecter, Miriam Ottenberg, Robert G. Lewis, Neal Ulevich, Walt Bogdanich and Robert Teague, among others.
This year's winners
Willard G. Bleyer, one of the Daily Cardinal's earliest editors and founder of the Wisconsin Journalism School.
Steven Pogorzelski, CEO of Monster.com
Cardinal Business Manager 1983
John Darnton, of The New York Times and winner of the Pulitzer-Prize in 1982 for his reporting from Poland.
Daily Cardinal editor 1967
Jack Geiger, physician, professor at the City University of New York Medical School whose work in rural health care and underserved populations has been cited by the United Nations Population Fund.
Daily Cardinal Editor 1944
Abigail Goldman, reporter for the Los Angeles Times, whose series on Wal-Mart won the Pulitzer Prize last year.
Daily Cardinal campus editor 1992
Robert Taylor Service Award
Named for the Cardinal's longest-serving board member, the late Professor Robert Taylor, this award honors a Cardinal alumnus who performed extraordinary service to The Daily Cardinal, either during his or her tenure as a student editor, or afterward as an alum. Past winners include Bill Swislow, Jeff Smoller, Ivan Strmecki and Brannon Lambert.
This year's winner
Gail Bensinger, who led the Cardinal during the tumultuous '64-'65 term, participated in the Selma March, and stood behind a staff member who was denounced for "living with known communists."
William Wesley Young Award
Named for the Cardinal's founder, this award recognizes a recent Cardinal graduate who has achieved significant advancement in his or her chosen career within five to fifteen years of leaving the newspaper. Past winners include Anthony Shadid, John Kovalic and Peter Kafka.
This year's winner
James Norton, 1998 Cardinal editor in chief, formerly the Middle East Editor for the Christian Science Monitor and now director of research for Al Franken's "The O'Franken Factor" on Air America Radio.
Alumnus of the Year Award
Given to the Cardinal alumnus who has achieved the most outstanding level of work in the past year. Past winners include Marilyn Johnson Shuman, Nancy Bobrowitz, Jonathan Wolman and Ben Karlin.
This year's winner
Anthony Shadid, whose coverage of the war in Iraq for the Washington Post, undertaken at great risk to himself just a short time after being wounded by gunmen in Ramallah while covering the Palestinian intifada there, was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize last year.
A special thanks to all those who submitted suggestions and nominees. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.
Hope to see you all at this year's event!
More Competition for the Cardinal
Hard as it may be to believe, there are those for whom the Badger Herald simply isn't right-wing enough.
Weary of what they describe as liberalism in the Madison media, conservative students at UW-Madison will roll out their own newspaper next semester.
On Feb. 12, the birth date of Republican President Abraham Lincoln, the Mendota Beacon will begin publishing every other week under the direction of junior economics major Tim Shea, who will be its managing editor. The paper will get start-up money from a conservative group known as The Leadership Institute, in Arlington, Va.
Shea described his decision to start the newspaper as an act of intellectual self-defense.
"There's definitely a lot of hostility toward the conservative way of thinking on campus," Shea said. "By putting out a newspaper, that's something that people can pick up and read, and they don't have to listen to people shooting down their views. They can just read the paper and then decide whether or not they agree with what we have to say."
Editors of UW-Madison's existing student newspapers, The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald, said they welcomed the competition. But they didn't accept Shea's description of their news pages as slanted.
"We personally do a fine job of presenting both sides of the issue," said Cristina Daglis, editor-in-chief of The Badger Herald, which itself was started more than 30 years ago as a conservative response to The Daily Cardinal.
"I get a little bit nervous about (any media outlet) that places a label of conservative or liberal on (itself). I would have a difficult time taking the news seriously."
Shea said his paper would offer five columnists and cover national news, health, technology, and local news with a twist he says is missing from other publications - an embrace of "conservative" topics. If College Republicans, for example, do something newsworthy, he said, such as visit military veterans in local hospitals, that story will get just as much ink as the other papers might give an anti-war rally.
"We think those stories have an equal right to be published and to have people read them," Shea said.
Shea also said there seemed to be "tremendous interest" in his newspaper, judging by the 50 or so responses to job ads in the first week. But Alexander Balistreri, editor-in-chief of the Daily Cardinal, said success would take more than that.
"I don't think it depends on the concept of the paper," Balistreri said. "The burden will be on the shoulders of those putting it out. If they do a good job, I think it can develop a successful niche on campus."