Baruch’s Dollars & Sense Wins “Mark of Excellence” Award from Journalism’s Top Professional Organization
The Society of Professional Journalists named the student-run magazine the “Best Affiliated Website in the Northeast”April 14, 2021
The Mark of Excellence Award for Best Affiliated Website was presented to the staff of Baruch’s Dollars & Sense in a virtual ceremony.
Dollars & Sense (D&S), the student-run online news magazine published by the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions, has been named the best affiliated college journalism website in the Northeast by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), journalism’s leading professional organization.
SPJ awarded D&S a Mark of Excellence as the top affiliated online publication in its Northeast region. By winning the regional category, D&S will be entered into SPJ’s national competition, to be judged later this year.
Editors-in-Chief Yasmeen Alia Persaud and Jose Nieves Herrera and Managing Editor Brenika Banks shared a joint statement from the editorial staff of Dollars & Sense celebrating the news: “The entire Dollars & Sense team is grateful to be surrounded by journalists who have worked hard to show their dedication to news beyond CUNY. This has been the mission of Dollars & Sense since 1979, and we thank our staff, past and present, for helping us achieve our goals. This award means that we are successfully telling the stories of voices that need to be heard. It shows that we are making an impact and pushing the boundaries of student journalism. We appreciate all of the accolades but are even more grateful that we have the opportunity to share stories with the world.”
D&S Faculty Advisors Vera Haller, Emily Johnson, and Gisele Regatao also congratulated the students on their success, saying, “We are beyond proud of our students’ accomplishments and are so happy that they received this recognition.”
The SPJ contest attracts entries from leading journalism programs across the country, undergraduate and graduate; among the other winners and finalists this year were entries from Columbia, Missouri, Syracuse’s Newhouse School and CUNY’s Newmark School. Other finalists in the category that D&S won included The Harvard Crimson and The Ithacan at Ithaca College.
In their announcement, SPJ shared commentary from the judges about each entrant. Writing about D&S, one judge said, “This site impressed me with its diversity of multimedia and the high quality achieved by them all.”
A Proud History
Founded in 1979 by Professor Emerita Roslyn Bernstein, for years the magazine was printed each spring and distributed to students, faculty, alumni, corporate leaders and journalists in the New York region. In 2009, Dollars & Sense switched to an online format to capitalize on multimedia technology and publish students’ work more frequently.
Top Honors
Dollars & Sense has frequently been named one of the top online college magazines by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, winning another of their Silver Crown awards this year. In 2018, its coverage of the midterm elections in rural Maine was named the best student business journalism project of the year by SABEW, the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.
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