QUEENSLAND Country Life was named among the winners at the 2015 PANPA Newspaper of the Year Awards in Sydney last Friday night.
QCL took out the non-daily Newspaper of the Year in the regional category. It was an exciting win for the QCL team, with more than 700 entries from major daily and weekend mastheads from Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific across the categories.
QCL was one of seven finalists in the regional category, along with mastheads such as The Land, the Albany Advertiser and the Surf Coast Times. In accepting the award, Roma-based QCL editor Penelope Arthur said it was a great privilege to record the stories of rural Queenslanders each week.
“We have a geographically diverse newsroom and that not only creates challenges, but great opportunities for us to tell the stories that really matter to our readers,” she said.
“This award is fantastic recognition of all the hard work that our journalists, photographers, sales staff, graphic designers, admin staff and sub-editors do every week.”
In announcing the award, the judges noted a significant jump in QCL’s online readership that has seen unique views on queenslandcountrylife.com.au jump from 38,000 in June 2013 to 83,000 in June 2015.
They noted several successful community campaigns that highlighted strong reader engagement, including QCL’s ‘That’s not a lamb’ campaign against animal rights group PETA.
QCL’s PETA Facebook post reached more than 420,000 people, was shared 10,500 times, and received 14,377 likes and 1570 comments.
Former QCL editor, now group managing editor Qld/NT, Brad Cooper, attended the PANPA awards and said QCL’s high-quality journalism and its breadth of content impressed the judges.
“For the journalists who write for an extremely information-rich newspaper like QCL, there can be no higher praise than this,” he said.
“They are a very hard-working team committed to excellence and their readers, and I congratulate them on this fine achievement.”
QCL’s Andrea Crothers was named as a finalist in the photography awards.