Continuing in the quality tradition of the broadsheet paper, The Cavalier Daily Online Edition (www.cavalierdaily.com) was recognized as one of the nation’s best last November.

The Associated Collegiate Press bestowed its first-ever Online Pacemaker Award to The Cavalier Daily and seven other online collegiate publications.

Winning the award was "great validation for all that we had been doing," said Jon Erdman. Erdman, now chief financial officer, was online manager last year.

Erdman said the page had been getting positive feedback at the University level, "but it was nice to be recognized at the national level."

Pacemaker is the highest award the ACP grants. Contestant sites were judged on design, navigation and interactivity, along with graphics and writing and editing.

Non-ACP staff media experts conduct the judging. For the competition, online papers must be available for viewing for about two months in the fall.

Former Editor-in-Chief Tom Bednar said the online staff was aware of the award, and that there was a definite effort to get the page in shape for the competition period.

Going for the award "put a lot of things in focus," Bednar said.

There had already been major improvements to parts of the page, such as the search engine, so the focus prior to the competition period was on the more user-facing aspects of the page. "A lot of little things got done," he said.

Bednar added that the process "helped the staff evolve into a better structure," and it "made us aware of how well the page is working."

Staff members are constantly looking at other publications for ideas for improvement. "There are a lot of good ones out there," Erdman said.

Bednar doubted that there would be the same emphasis on the award for 2001, but he said the online staff’s "culture is really striving and trying to do cool things," award or not.

Seven other online publications were also awarded the Online Pacemaker: Mesa Legend (Mesa Community College—Mesa, Ariz.), The Review Online (University of Delaware—Newark, Del.), Indiana Digital Student (University of Indiana—Bloomington, Ind.), The Maneater (University of Missouri—Columbia), Reporter (Rochester Institute of Technology—Rochester, NY), NewsNet (Brigham Young University—Provo, Utah), and Wingspan Online (Laramie County Community College—Cheyene, Wyo.). There were also 17 finalists named.

The Online Pacemaker award was announced at the ACP’s annual conference, which was held in Washington, D.C., in November 2000.

Erdman and former Online Manager Portman Wills attended the convention, along with current Editor-in-Chief John Clark and Assistant Managing Editor Erin Perucci.

The Online Pacemaker award replaced the ACP’s Best of the Net award, which was started in 1995.