Small Triumphs

I am a firm believer that even the smallest triumphs should be celebrated, even if it seems a bit selfish. The good thing about having a blog is you can do some selfish celebrating and not feel too bad, because hey, it's your blog!

So I have decided to do a little celebrating of a recent triumph that I had a hand in.

In the newspaper world, we get to enter our work in annual contests with the hope of winning an award (and bragging rights for the year). For me, I go all year without really thinking about such contests, until it comes time to enter them. Then it's a mad scramble to find the best content to submit.

Since becoming the Digital Content Editor at the Clinton Herald, I typically don't produce stories or photos, so my submissions to contests never bear my name. My job is to do anything and everything online, and so I submit our website and/or specific web presentations to contests.

I recently submitted our site and six presentations to our parent company's contest, "Best of CNHI." We were excited this week to learn that we had won the award for "Website of the Year" in our division.

This was a huge encouragement for me as the website has been my [work] life since August 2011. I've spent over a year working on it, tweaking it, and trying to do the best I can with what I have. To win two awards in one year has been very, very exciting. (Our first website award and the experiences surround it are documented here.)

Among the presentations we submitted was this year-in-review slideshow I had put together:


We also submitted a page I put together for RAGBRAI (a bike ride across Iowa that ended in Clinton; it's a pretty big deal here), a web presentation my co-worker Angie Bicker and I worked on (she wrote the story and took the photo while I filmed and edited the video; we also won an Associated Press award for it), an election day guide I assembled from our content and ballot information, and two local stories (one on the caucuses and one on a settlement) that I packaged with additional information.

I love having the opportunity to be part of a team and contribute with my own strengths and abilities. We really have seen what we can accomplish when each person works toward a common goal. Yay us! :)