By The Tablet staff
PROSPECT HEIGHTS — DeSales Media Group won 33 awards this year at the Catholic Media Conference on June 21 in Atlanta.
The Catholic Media Association’s annual conference took place June 18-21 with more than 300 participants from around the country and Canada. The group represents more than 200 publications and 90 communications offices throughout the United States and Canada.
DeSales Media Group, the communications and technology ministry for the Diocese of Brooklyn, produces The Tablet, Nuestra Voz, and Currents News.
“I am very pleased by the showing of how DeSales Media’s content was regarded by the awards committee,” The Tablet editor, Michael Gray said.
The monthly diocesan Spanish newspaper, Nuestra Voz, won first place as Spanish publication of the year. Fabiola Rodriguez, The Tablet’s graphic designer, received several awards including second place as graphic artist/designer of the year.
Rodriguez won eight other awards including third place in a best promotional house ad and second and third place for best use of graphics. She won third place for best chart or information graphic and second place and honorable mention for best original illustrations. Rodriguez also won first place and honorable mention for best layout of an article of column in a diocesan newspaper.
Other top awards for work published the previous year included a second-place win by Currents News for the best video on a social justice issue by a diocesan and national news organization for the video “Feeding the Homeless Was Late Bishop’s Passion,” depicting the ministry of Los Angeles Bishop David O’Connell, who was murdered in 2023.
The Tablet won honorable mention for a best print special supplement one-time special issue for its publication of “Post Roe v. Wade: Abortion in America One Year Later,” and it won third place for best print special supplement for a regular supplement for The Tablet Jr.
The Tablet took home three awards in the columns category including first place to Bishop Emeritus Nicholas DiMarzio for best regular column by a bishop or archbishop for his “Walking with Migrants” column. John Alexander won an honorable mention in the category of best regular column (culture, the arts and leisure) for his “Tuned Into Faith” column and Father Robert Lauder won second place for best regular column (spiritual life) for his column “Faith & Thought.”
Two of the Tablet’s editorials received third place wins for weekly publications. The winning editorials were “Moral Decline Leads to a City Where Crime Does Pay” in the category of best editorial on a local issue and “A Decade of Teaching Catholics to Dialogue” for best editorial on a national or international issue.
Tablet staff writers also received multiple awards. Paula Katinas and Bill Miller won first place in the category of best coverage of immigration for their stories on migrants and asylum-seekers in New York and red tape faced by Ukrainians fleeing the war in their homeland.
Miller and Alicia Venter won third place in this year’s entry Hot Topic-Eucharistic Revival for their coverage of a New York state Eucharistic revival, a Lenten pilgrimage, and a parish revival.
National correspondents John Lavenburg and Carol Zimmermann won third place in coverage of pro-life issues for coverage of the annual March for Life and changing abortion laws in the states.
Zimmermann, Lavenburg, and Miller also won third place for coverage of racial inequities featuring the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and a Black History Month message.
Zimmermann won an honorable mention for coverage of an Oklahoma Catholic charter school and Lavenburg won an honorable mention for the story “Soulless Homilies” about AI generated homilies.
Katinas won third place in coverage of Catholic education for writing about Catholic school gains. She also won second place for best reporting on a series on priesthood, religious life, or diaconate for her series “Before They Were Priests” about what priests did before their vocations.
She received an honorable mention in the category of best reporting of social justice issues on the life and dignity of the human person for her story on college students continuing their pro-life work after they were harassed by a professor.
Katinas and Miller won in the category of best news writing on a local or regional event by a weekly publication. Katinas won honorable mention for a city street named for a local teen who died eight years ago and many hope will one day be named a saint. Miller won third place for his article “Christ Shining in the Darkness,” about the diocese’s 200-year-old cathedral adding a light to its tower.
Miller also won an honorable mention for a piece about scams with internet relic sales, second place for a personality profile on the poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer, and an honorable mention for his profile on Father Duffy, a military chaplain who served in the Spanish-American War and World War I. He received a third-place win in the category of reporting on the dignity and rights of workers for his piece on those who died in a 1911 sweatshop fire in New York City.