Recently, the Knight Errant won two distinguished awards. From the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the Knight Errant was awarded a Silver Crown in the “Hybrid News” category. The Knight Errant website also became a Sno-Distinguished site after earning the six required badges from Sno Sites, a website that offers publishing solutions for student journalism programs.  

The Silver Crown Award was won in the “Hybrid News” category, which looks at the layout of this year’s website, as well as last year’s print edition papers. Crown awards are awarded in either gold or silver at both the high-school and college levels.

Getting a Silver Crown is a big honor, as the contest for them is nationwide. “I think the reason we were awarded the Silver Crown is because we’ve done a spectacular job keeping up on news, [and] we have a variety of content that is timely,” Koshiol said.

Last year the Knight Errant received a Gold Crown in the same category, and aspires to again in the future. “Getting a Silver Crown is great; there is no way I’d expect to get a Gold Crown my first year as an adviser,” Koshiol said.

Koshiol credits the Knight Errant’s success to the entire staff that has worked on the publications. In particular, Koshiol notes that the photos in both the print and online publications have excelled despite a small photography staff. “I’m super proud of our photographers; we’ve had pictures with every non-opinions story,” Koshiol said.

The Knight Errant Website also recently became a Sno-Distinguished site after earning all six badges required for the award. The badges recognize achievement in six different areas, including “Site Excellence,” which judges the general appearance of the site, a “Multimedia” badge, highlighting excellence in videos and slideshows, and an “Excellence of Writing” badge, awarded when three stories are published on the Best of Sno site. There is also “Continuous Coverage” badge, which showcases excellence in timely, consistent story coverage, a “Story Page Excellence” badge, which commends excellence in layout of story pages, and an “Audience Engagement” badge, that recognizes social media presence, Twitter followers, etc.

“I’m really proud of our staff for putting in the effort to reach all of the goals that the Sno-Distinguished Sites Program sets forward,” Koshiol said.