The Falcon has finally brought home a Gold Crown – one of the top awards in scholastic journalism.

In the past nine years, The Falcon has received four Crown Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA), all of them Silver.

This year, however, was not like previous years. The Falcon won a Gold Crown for both the print publication and the online edition of last year’s newspaper. The Falcon was the only newspaper in the country to win Gold Crowns for both versions.

“It’s just a nice acknowledgement of the hard work that the students put in,” said journalism adviser Michael Tyler. “There were a lot of great people in that class and they really deserved this pat on the back. [Last year’s] Editors in Chief, Angela Chiang and Katrin Cooper, and many other students put a lot of effort into this and they deserve it.”

Cooper found the award to be a significant honor.

“This is absolutely amazing. It’s a great honor to get a Gold Crown,” said Cooper. “I’m proud of everybody because this really is a team effort; this is for all of those late nights and those early mornings. I know that both [Chiang] and I seemed tough at times and that’s only because we knew that there was amazing skill and talent in everybody. This is the icing on the cake.”

In total, 1,795 high school and college publications were reviewed by judges picked by the CSPA. In the high school category, only 20 Gold Crowns were awarded to print newspapers and four Gold Crowns were awarded to online newspapers. To see the various awards distributed, visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cspa/docs/contests-and-critiques/crown-awards/recipients/2009-scholastic-crown.html#N100EE