The Squamish Chief team is celebrating today after it scooped up six awards in the 2024 Canadian Community Newspaper Awards (CCNA) competition.
The awards were announced online on Sept. 16.
The national annual awards feature 27 categories honouring outstanding editorial, photography, multimedia and overall excellence in community newspaper publishing.
The 2024 winners were selected from 760 entries for work published in 2023.
The judges are volunteers who work in the industry across Canada.
In the General Excellence category, which compares publications of the same circulation, The Squamish Chief picked up first place for Best Editorial Page.
For this award, the judges looked at the outlets’ print opinion pieces, including columns and letters.
We took home second place for Best All-Round Newspaper.
“The Squamish Chief takes news seriously but has fun doing it. It's got a clean, accessible look,” bright and contemporary,” reads the judges’ comment.
We also got a third-place finish in the Best Front Page category.
In the Premier Award category, Jennifer Thuncher earned first place for Best News story for her December 2023 story, "Do EAO restrictions on construction workers stigmatize a vital workforce?"
Thuncher and former reporters Steven Chua and Andrew Hughes were awarded second place in the Feature Series category for "Opioid Crisis," which included a series of stories that were all published in one print paper and online at the end of May last year dedicated to exploring how the toxic drug crisis has impacted locals.
Hughes also won a third-place nod in the Best multi-media Breaking News Coverage category for his August 2023 story ‘Quest University lands bought by Capilano University in Squamish deal."
See all the 2024 CCNA winners on its website.
