For the second time this academic year, The Daily Iowan (DI) has earned the prestigious Pacemaker Award: College news’ equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize. This time, the award applies to the online edition of the paper.
In order to apply for the Pacemaker, which is awarded by the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP), college news organizations are required to submit general information as well as examples of their best work.
According to Roxy Ekberg, who is the executive editor of the DI, she along with Jason Brummond and Isabelle Foland collaborated to choose three of their strongest standalone pages to submit.
After careful consideration, they settled on a multimedia piece about a No Kings protest, a voter guide for the 2025 local elections, and a profile about local DJs. The ACP also reviewed other aspects of the DI website to get an understanding of what the paper’s day-to-day coverage consists of.
To earn an award like such, college papers must keep up with technological and digital advancements as well as find new, innovative ways to engage their online audiences. With this in mind, Ekberg has spent her time as executive editor working on restructuring the DI’s digital team.
Ekberg said that over the past year, she and other DI journalists collaborated to make their website stories more visually dynamic and their social media posts more engaging. In the process, Ekberg has also worked to train DI journalists to be versatile professionals who have all the multimedia skills necessary to produce all story elements on their own.
“They (DI journalists) are learning ‘here’s how you design the digital presentation of a story,’” she said. “So incorporating graphics, photos, videos and all that was made possible by the incredible hard work and dedication of those digital producers.”
Due to the DI’s focus on making a shift in its digital strategy, Foland was crucial in facilitating this process.
“She learned how to use the different softwares…and she was able to teach her team how to use them so that we would be able to do more fun and creative things on our website and present our stories in more engaging ways,” Ekberg said.
Along with expressing what an honor it is for the DI to have received this award, Ekberg emphasized the paper’s main goal is not to work in pursuit of awards. Rather, it is to serve local communities and to represent the voices of the general public.
“This achievement just reinstates the hard work and effort that my team and every team before me has put into providing our community with the highest level of journalism possible,” she said.
As a result of the digital restructuring Ekberg and leadership within the DI have done, engagement is through the roof. She said the DI is more effectively catering to social media platforms’ specific audiences, and there was even a recent story that reached an engagement time of five minutes: A time unheard of in today’s age of passive consumption and information overload.
Looking ahead, Ekberg hopes to continue working toward her goals of producing more social media content and turning DI reporters into multimedia professionals.
“Turning reporters into these multifaceted, more well-rounded reporters is something that I want to accomplish,” she said. “To give them that knowledge so that they have it for next year, for their next step in life, for their next job or wherever they choose to go next, that’s something that really, really matters to me.”
All in all, to Ekberg, the DI’s achievement of the Pacemaker is a reflection of the time and dedication these young journalists put into their work.
“It’s just an honor,” she said. “I find it very reassuring that our learning lab of an institution is able to be recognized at these levels.