Southwestern College’s student-run newspaper received two prestigious awards for its in-depth stories about issues on-campus and within the community.
The Southwestern Sun is no stranger to being nationally recognized, but it received its first-ever Corbin Gwaltney Award, which includes a $5,000 cash prize from the national Society of Professional Journalists.
The publication won in the large category for schools with 10,000 or more students.
According to the college, the Sun competed in categories alongside other esteemed schools such as Harvard, UCLA, Columbia, Missouri, USC, Princeton, and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State, among hundreds of others.
The Sun was also recently awarded Collegiate Newspaper of the Year by the National Newspaper Association.
In August 2021, the Sun was named one of the nation’s top 100 college publications of the last century by the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP) in honor of its centennial celebration launch. To qualify, a college or university student-operated publication needed to be a previous recipient of an ACP Pacemaker award, which is equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for college student journalism.
The Sun won its first pacemaker in 2003 and has since consistently won Pacemaker awards for its newspaper and website.
In 2019, The Sun was inducted into the Associated Collegiate Press Hall of Fame.
The Western Publishing Association named the newspaper the nation’s Best Publication in the student publication category for the 2019-2020 academic year.
