UA Alumni Magazine Receives Two International Awards

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The Alabama Alumni Magazine has received an Award of Excellence in the 2006 Communicator Awards and an Award of Excellence in the 2006 APEX Awards.

The magazine is a publication of The University of Alabama’s Office of Alumni Affairs and National Alumni Association. Both awards were presented for its fall 2005 issue.

Communicator Awards is an international competition judged by industry professionals, recognizing outstanding work that serves as a benchmark for the industry. The Award of Excellence is the competition’s most prestigious honor. This is the third year in a row the Alabama Alumni Magazine has won a Communicator Award, but the first time it received a top placement.

There were some 5,214 entries in this year’s Communicator contest. Among the other winners in the Print Media category were AARP, Amazon.com, the American Medical Association, the National Cancer Institute, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Public Relations Society of America and the PGA.

The APEX Awards program, now in its 18th year, recognizes excellence in publications work by professional communicators, with entries judged by a panel of nationally prominent editors and publishers on editorial content, design and overall effectiveness. There were nearly 5,000 entries from around the world this year, and other winners in the Magazines and Journals category included the American Bar Association, IBM, Toyota, the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona and Auburn University. The Alabama Alumni Magazine has won two previous APEX Awards, in 2004 and 2005.

UA has produced a publication for its alumni for more than 135 years, making the Alabama Alumni Magazine one of the oldest continuously published alumni magazines in the country. It is issued once in each season and distributed to members of the NAA, the University community, alumni associations around the country, and legislators and other decision makers in the state and the nation. The current circulation is about 30,000.

Janice Fink, manager of alumni publications and executive editor of the magazine, produces the major publications of the Alumni Association with the help of student interns who function as editorial assistants, along with a network of talented freelance writers and photographers. The design consultant for Alumni Publications projects is Laura Lineberry, an adjunct professor of graphic design at UA with more than 20 years of experience.

“Key ingredients to our success in recent years have been the high quality of students who come to work with us from the College of Communication and also the willingness of graduates and friends of the University to participate in the magazine by providing information, photos, story ideas and encouragement,” Fink said.

“Another interesting aspect of our office is that we have an archive that includes every UA alumni magazine produced in the last century, and our collection is frequently used by historians and authors for research.

“We are in the process of having the archived magazine articles indexed by topics and writers, with the help of the UA School of Library and Information Studies. When this is completed, there will be a searchable database naming all past subjects covered in the alumni magazine available on our Web site,” she added.