The Third Annual Daily Cardinal Alumni Awards Dinner, held in Madison this May, drew nearly 100 alumni and current staff members to celebrate the best of The Daily Cardinal past and present.
The day’s festivities began with a luncheon presentation from Cardinal editor in chief Andrew Wallmeyer, who announced that this year the Cardinal had won eight regional Society of Professional Journalism Awards and one national SPJ Award for its election coverage. In addition, Cardinal photographer Scott Anderson was named the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s Student Photographer of the Year.
Throughout the afternoon Cardinal alumni toured the paper’s offices and talked with current staff, sharing memories of their own time and learning about the Cardinal of today. Photographers Neal Ulevich, inducted into this year’s Hall of Fame, and David Spradling, spent the afternoon looking up their work in the Cardinal’s archives and reminiscing about friends whose bylines they recognized.
That night, alumni and staff gathered in the Fluno Center to award this year’s class of distinguished Cardinal alumni. The Alumnus of the Year was Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Newhouse of the Great Falls, Mont. Tribune, whose series on the effects of alcoholism garnered journalism’s top prize in the year 2000.
The winner of the William Wesley Young Award, given to an alumnus of the Cardinal who left the paper no less than five years ago but has already achieved significant success in his or her field, was Nathan Brackett, senior editor of music at Rolling Stone. Brackett was arts editor at the Cardinal from 1990 to 1991.
Longtime Cardinal printer and former editor Dave Newman was given the Robert Taylor Service Award for his finding solutions to Cardinal problems great and small for 25 years.
Former Cardinal sportswriter Robert Teague, whose 1949 stories about UW football coach Harry Stuhldreher led to his firing, was inducted into this year’s Hall of Fame. Teague won an Emmy Award for news reporting in 1983.
Teague also accepted the award for his co-author in the Stuhldreher stories, Mort Levine, who recently was named the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s executive of the year.
Walt Bogdanich, Cardinal editor from 1971 to 1972, accepted his induction into the Cardinal Hall of Fame with "Were it not for The Daily Cardinal I would not have had the experience of being sued for libel for $10 billion," saying the Cardinal was one of the most important influences on his journalistic career.
Ulevich talked about the camraderie Cardinal alumni felt not only during their time at the paper but forever afterward, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V, "...we few, we happy few, we band of brothers ... and sisters!"
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