It has certainly been a momentous year at The Hatchet.

This Sunday at their annual convention, The Associated Collegiate Press presented The Hatchet with two Pacemaker awards – for its print and online editions. The ACP is the largest organization dedicated to the student press, and a Pacemaker is considered one of the highest awards in college journalism.

This comes on the heels of an announcement last spring that The Society of Professional Journalists named The Hatchet the best non-daily student newspaper in the nation.

Both of these awards are major achievements, and they are a credit to the quality journalism coming out of this paper. This is also the first year that The Hatchet has received all three awards, which speaks to the growing stature of The Hatchet as both a newspaper and an online news source.

The Hatchet was one of 10 papers selected in the ACP’s non-daily newspaper category, and one of 5 selected in the non-daily Web site category. The Hatchet was the only paper to receive the SPJ award.

The high quality of journalism can be seen in each issue of The Hatchet, but I can tangibly show you how far our Web site has come in recent years. When we last won the online Pacemaker in 2006, our Web site looked like this. Since then we have completely redesigned the site, revamped our blogs, and added video, podcasts and other interactive features.