The Chronicle, Echo Magazine, and Hair Trigger Recognized at 2021 Columbia Scholastic Press Association Awards

PhotoAn Echo Magazine cover, 2020
Three student publications will be recognized at the Columbia University Scholastic Press Association’s 2021 Crown Awards.

Columbia College Chicago is pleased to announce that Columbia University’s Scholastic Press Association has selected three Columbia College Chicago student publications as finalists for the Association’s 2021 Crown Awards. The Chronicle as well as Echo magazine and Hair Trigger have been selected and will win either Gold or Silver Crowns in March 2021.

Crown Awards are the highest recognition given by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association to a student digital or print publication. There are no set number of awards each year, rather the awardees are determined by a panel of Crown Judges who assemble each year at Columbia University to assess all entries. The Gold Crown Awards were first presented in 1982, with Silver Crown Awards added in 1984.

The Chronicle, the award-winning weekly student newspaper published every Monday during the fall and spring semesters (with digital content online), reaches student, faculty, and staff at Columbia as well as readers in Chicago’s South Loop. In 2020, The Chronicle was honored with a Silver Crown as a hybrid news outlet at the Scholastic Press Association Awards. That same year, the judges especially praised the visual elements of The Chronicle’s front page and noted the strength of the publication’s online photo galleries and videos.

Echo magazine is an award-winning magazine created by a team of Journalism, Graphic Design, and Photography students every spring semester in the capstone class titled College Magazine Workshop. For each issue, students re-imagine the magazine and choose a unique theme and design style. Recent issues have explored themes including "life," "home," and "body." In 2020, Echo took the top Crown Award as a Gold Crown winner for "The Body Issue" print edition and accompanying website.

Hair Trigger, a campus magazine that dedicates three of its four yearly issues to work produced by Columbia Creative Writing students, has long been celebrated by the CSPA. During its 44-year publication history, it has won an estimated 38 CSPA Gold and Silver Crown Awards. In 2019, a CSPA judge said of Hair Trigger, “The selections…are extraordinary. I was thoroughly engrossed in the stories, each more riveting than the last. Hair Trigger is a par excellence literary magazine that others should set as their standards.”

Hair Trigger is one of three English and Creative Writing journals that will cease publication at the end of the year as Allium, a department-wide innovative multi-genre journal, launches. The journal will come out three times each year, with Fall and Spring issues published digitally and Winter issues published in print. The first digital issue will go live September 13, 2021, with the first print issue planned for release February 14-18 2022. Allium will replace three genre-specific journals: Columbia Poetry Review (poetry), Hair Trigger (fiction), and Punctuate (non-fiction). All three former journals have been archived on the new publication's website. Allium will be helmed by Editor-in-Chief Ken Daley. In a description of Allium’s goal, editors Alexis Pride and Tony Trigilio have said, “We are about inclusion—representing the range and diversity of writers’ voices. We believe the art of writing is an exploration—of a complex and evolving world.” Interested authors can submit work to Allium here.

More information regarding the Scholastic Press Association Awards can be found here.  

MEDIA INQUIRIES

Rhiannon Koehler
Communications Manager
rkoehler@colum.edu

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