Gazette scoops awards

THE Pakenham-Berwick Gazette featured prominently at last week’s Victorian Country Press Association awards at the annual conference held in Healesville.
The Gazette picked up the award for Overall Newspaper Excellence (circulation between 3000 and 10,000).
Judge Graham Gorrel was particularly impressed by the special Century of Faces edition in March, which profiled 100 readers from age one to 100 as part of the company’s centenary celebrations.
Mr Gorrel described it as a “cracker of an idea for its centenary” and “one of the best newspaper concepts I have ever seen”.
He said it topped a great entry from the Gazette that included “passion, guts and the absolute belief that it is the voice of the community.”
Melissa Grant’s series of articles on the battle against the desalination plant powerlines was highly commended by judges, who described her reporting as “high calibre”.
The Gazette also won the award for Best Use of Colour (3000 – 10,000), with judge Les Holloway citing the footy liftout and kinder enrolment features as hitting the spot.
Gazette photographers Stewart Chambers and Luke Plummer also cleaned up.
Stewart won the Best News Photograph award (Over 10,000) for the photo he took for the Gazette’s sister newspaper the Mountain Views Mail, of a sole surviving house in Steels Creek after the Black Saturday fires razed the area.
Judges Neil Newitt and John French said the photo hit the mark by using the element of the surviving house weighted against the enormity of the surrounding devastation.
Luke won the Best Photographic Study (3,000 – 10,000) for his lenscape of a bird feeding its young.
Mr Newitt and Mr French said that the hook of the image was the mother flying in to feed them.
The Mountain Views Mail, part of Star News Group, won the award for Local Reporting (Over 10,000) for its coverage of the Black Saturday bushfires and the aftermath.