I am competitive. I always have been, and I always will be. As I was submitting our entries into the Missouri Press Association Contest for this year, I was excited about the quality of our content and the prospect of another successful year.
It was at that point I realized how long I had been doing this. I have a decade’s worth of awards hanging on my office walls or tucked away in moving boxes. It made me wonder, what exactly did I win in my first state press association contest? Or, what are the most interesting articles from each year that won awards?
People always ask me what my favorite stories have been over the years, so maybe after writing this two-part series, I’ll have better answers to give.
I started my reporting career at The Daily Citizen in Searcy, Ark., on June 27, 2011, as a hybrid news and sports reporter. Shortly after my hiring, the sports editor left and I was moved to that position, which is where I was surprised to find my first ever award came.
In 2012, I won a single award in the Arkansas Press Association contest, second place for a sports feature. The story was on an author, Stan Beck, who was writing a book called “College Sports Traditions: Picking Up Butch, Silent Night, and Hundreds of Others.”
He came to Searcy to take in Harding University’s a cappella National Anthem at one of its basketball games. For those who haven’t heard it, the few videos floating around YouTube only do it partial justice.
It was a memory I will never forget, and in the hour or so I spent with him, I thought Stan had the coolest job in the world.
A year later and switched to a full-time news reporter, my growing confidence in my work corresponded with my awards — three firsts, two seconds and a third. Unfortunately, those stories no longer exist online that I can find.
One first was in health-related topics, a story I had done on a woman who lost her mother to breast cancer and found comfort in photos and items kept in memory. The second was in political reporting, an election issue story on two state senate candidates and their plans to lure the natural gas industry to the county. The final first was a sports column about American Legion baseball and how a lack of volunteers and participation was nearly sinking the program in Searcy.
Those would be my only awards in Searcy, as I started at the Cassville Democrat on Jan. 13, 2014. We did not submit any contest entries for that year, as all entries must be from the previous calendar year. That didn’t matter, though, as I was focused on being successful in my first editor position — and the haul three years later would make up for a year without.
In 2015, my first eligible year at the Missouri Press Association contest, we won big. On top of winning the first Gold Cup in the paper’s 151-year history, I swept the investigative journalism category: first place for a story on the high poverty rate in the county; second for an economic piece looking at the states of the unemployment, real estate, ag and tourism industries; and third place for a story on the local school districts’ free and reduced-price meal rates.
Ideas for those stories came largely from others I had written in previous years, and to do it in Barry County was an important step in my career as an editor. This collection of stories may be one of my best over any one year and may even be worth resurrecting this year for another update to them.
The following year, we repeated the Gold Cup, but I did not repeat my investigative reporting sweep. Instead, I got three first-place plaques, one of which was for a photo package that bred an inside joke in our office for a while.
In my first year shooting the Rotary Rodeo in Cassville, I got an amazing shot in the first event — calf roping. The cowboy is in a squared stance, rope in his mouth, hat covering just his eyes, and the calf is airborne at the cowboy’s waist, perfectly sideways and looking dead at the camera.
Because of how much I loved that shot, the joke was that every year I had to replicate it. After eight rodeos, the original is still the best.
But, the pursuit of replication has led to some other great rodeo photos, which always seem to play well with the judges.
After two years in Barry County, I was chugging along steadily, but my greatest personal accomplishment and my proudest moment as editor were both yet to come. Check out next week’s column for more!
Kyle Troutman has served as the editor of the Cassville Democrat since 2014. In 2017, he was named William E. James/ Missouri Outstanding Young Journalist for daily newspapers. He may be reached at 417-847-2610 or ktroutman@cherryroad. com.
