By Vantage Staff
For the fourth consecutive year, the staff of The Vantage has won the coveted All-Kansas award at the annual Kansas Collegiate Media conference.
Staff members also earned 30 individual awards.
The All-Kansas award is given each year to the student publication that judges determine to be the top in its category. The award comes with a plaque and bragging rights.
At the conference on Monday, The Vantage staff was named the top paper among four-year private schools that entered the competition. Judges looked at three full issues of the competing publications to pick the winners.
The core 2025 Vantage staff included seniors Matthew Fowler, Anna Corbett-Neal, Dannicka McGrath, Aime Rutayisire and Victor Dixon.
Corbett-Neal, the paper’s co-editor-in-chief, won seven awards — including first-place nods for sports photography and profile writing. The other co-editor-in-chief, Fowler, won five awards, including first place for breaking news.
Photo editor McGrath won two awards, including first place for a photo story published from Newman’s’ fall 2025 Color Run. And Dixon, who was editor-in-chief for part of the fall 2025 semester, won two awards, as did sports editor Rutayisire.
Other winners were sports writer Grace Long and 2025 graduate Ana Zeikidze.
A few students who took journalism classes in 2025 and had their work published in the paper also won awards, including current staff writing Abigail VanNatta plus KJ Burns and Brandon Andino.
The conference wasn’t just about awards, though.
The Vantage staff also spent two days in sessions led by professional journalists and picked up knowledge on topics like creating vertical video, finding jobs in broadcast journalism, improving their writing skills and taking better photos. Among the speakers at the conference were Newman alumni and former Vantage staff members Tejay Cleland, who is now the sports director at KWCH Channel 12, and Emily Larkin-Valdez, who is a marketing manager at Century II.
“The members of last year’s Vantage staff worked well together and put out quality work week after week,” said Vantage adviser Denise Neil. “This was particularly impressive considering how few people were on the staff.”
PHOTO: AJ Bonilla, Staff Photographer
