By Rebecca Perlow
Insight Staff Writer

Mark Luckie

• Related: Student Project reflects changing industry
  

Honorees include current Student Project participants Clare Trapasso and Amy Van Vechten and former participant Mark S. Luckie. All three won awards for excellence in student journalism.

"This is the first time to my knowledge that something like that has happened," said Bill Canacci, an NLGJA national board member and Student Project coordinator. "It's a competition that's open to everybody. They're competing against people that have been doing this for years."

The Excellence in Journalism awards began in 1993 to encourage, recognize and reward excellence in journalism on issues relating to the LBGT community. Categories include excellence in LGBT media, news writing, feature writing, opinion/editorial, local television, online journalism, photojournalism, HIV/AIDS coverage and student journalism.

Trapasso, a Print/Online participant, and Van Vechten, a Video participant, are graduate students at New York University. They won second place for their work on "NYC Pavement Pieces: LGBT NYC," an online multimedia project profiling LGBT people in New York.

"I don't feel like it's really my award," Trapasso said. "I feel like Professor Yvonne Latty really deserves this award for pushing the multimedia online project."

Luckie, who worked on the Print/Online Student Project in 2006 and represents the University of California at Berkeley, won first place for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."