University Affairs was a major contender in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, announced in Toronto Wednesday night. The magazine website won two gold medals, for best news coverage and best blog, and a silver medal for best website design. UA competed in the category for business-to-business, professional and scholarly publications.
The COPA awards, now in their fifth year, have become an important milestone for websites of Canadian magazines and newspapers to measure themselves against their peers. COPA awards are produced by Masthead, a digital trade magazine for the Canadian magazine industry. University Affairs has won awards every year, and is now a three-time winner in both the news and the blog categories.
This time it was Melonie Fullick’s blog Speculative Diction that took the top honours. A doctoral candidate in education at York University, Melonie has a regular following of more than 3,000 readers. Her intelligent essays cover issues of the day affecting members of the university community, often commenting on how higher education is reported in the media.
The news category mandates three entries. For the award, our news section was represented by three stories by freelance contributors Rosanna Tamburri and by Karen Birchard published online in 2012. They are “Publishers with questionable practices prey on academics”; “Air Canada bans research primates from its flights”; and “B.C. makes free online textbooks available”.
In the website design category, University Affairs came second to Sparksheet, published by Spafax, a Montreal publisher.
University Affairs congratulates the winners and our entire editorial team.