Daniel keeps Hanna award in Ruston

The Sam Hanna award for Best Regular Column from the Louisiana Press Association appears to be getting comfortable in Ruston.

Ruston Daily Leader News Editor Caleb Daniel was named the winner of the Hanna award in the Leader’s division Thursday as part of the LPA’s 2021 Better Newspaper Competition.

Daniel’s win comes after Managing Editor Nancy Bergeron took home the honor in the previous competition cycle for 2020.

In fact, Leader staff swept the category this time around, with Bergeron coming in second and Editor Brian Trahan in third.

Trahan also swept the Best Single Editorial competition with first, second and third place entries, helping the Leader run the table where the opinion page is concerned.

“I was particularly pleased to see the newspaper win the Sam Hanna award for two years in a row and to have three of the staff members taking first, second and third in that category,” Leader Publisher Jerry Pye said.

The late Hanna was a wellrespected newspaper man who owned publications in Concordia, Franklin and Ouachita parishes. He was a former LPA president.

Like Bergeron before him, one of Daniel’s winning entries was a colorful description of a home encounter with members of the animal kingdom.

In “Observing a crime scene in the bird world,” published on Nov. 12, 2021, Daniel walked readers through an attack on a local woodpecker carried out by a Merlin falcon, which drew the attention of the surrounding avian population.

Two months earlier, Daniel’s other winning column used the high-profile lawsuit against Cedar Creek School and the sexual misconduct investigation into the National Federation of the Blind as examples of the beneficial and detrimental ways in which social media can be used in a community.

Daniel is a Lake Charles native who has lived in Ruston since 2014. He graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 2017 and has worked at the Leader since the fall of 2018.

Trahan’s winning editorials dealt with the Cedar Creek lawsuit, gun violence in Grambling and an overall upswing in violent crime, advocating for a responsible and even-keeled reaction from the community.

The six column and editorial placings were among the 22 the Leader staff was awarded this year across all categories.