Centennial State News

Colorado State University and the CSU System were big winners during the recent Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) awards, bagging 10 district honors for writing, marketing for the CSU Spur campus and STATE Magazine.

“These awards are significant in three ways,” Greg Luft, interim vice president for marketing and communications, told the CSU website. “First, they confirm the great skill and dedication of the writers and producers who dug into these stories, and I can’t emphasize that enough. Second, the awards reflect the relevance of the topics both on and off campus, and third, the stories confirm the vast and unique contributions that CSU makes to the community locally, nationally and abroad.”

All told, five members of CSU’s strategic communications team (formerly news and media relations) in the division of marketing and communications submitted entries that won Best of District VI Awards in the writing category: Joe Giordano, for “Timeline: A year of working through the pandemic at CSU;” Mark Gokavi, for “CM Cares transforms bathroom for girl with rare disease;” Anne Manning, for “Study: Singing, being male tend to produce more respiratory aerosols;” Stacy Nick, for “Aging Mastery Spanish Program breaks down more than language barriers;” and Allison Sylte, for “Evacuating CSU alumnus from Afghanistan ‘nothing short of a miracle’.”

The honors gave Luft a feeling of satisfaction.

“Having just assumed the interim vice president role a month ago, after many years teaching and managing in the journalism and media communication program, I can say that it is very invigorating to see great storytelling and journalism in a university context,” he said, according to CSU's website. “When you consider the connections that these stories create as they ripple through CSU’s diverse populations of potential students, on-campus and online students, staff, faculty, alumni and even vendors, it confirms the importance of the journalistic enterprise in an educational community.”

CASE presented the same recognition to a pair of entries submitted by the CSU System for the new Spur campus at the National Western Center in Denver, both in the area of marketing: one for the category “branding” and one for “marketing initiatives,” while STATE Magazine claimed three CASE awards for writing.