If you recall my last post about my capstone project, our final presentation of our magazine, Meridian, ended on somewhat of a melancholy note. We were bursting with pride for our literature and lifestyle prototype, but most of the executives we presented to at Meredith were less than impressed. We learned a hard lesson that day: Not everyone is going to like or understand what you do in life.

We learned another lesson yesterday. Some people are going to love it! I couldn’t be happier to share that Meridian won First Place in the Start-Up Magazine Project team category from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, or AEJMC.

This award is something our team was aspiring to from the first day of class. MU has a bit of a reputation to uphold — magazine prototypes from our Magazine Publishing class have taken home first prize for the past two years and snatched up quite a few silver medals and honorable mentions in the past. And we weren’t just competing against our incredibly talented classmates; this was a national competition.

Earlier in the day before the announcement, I had been thinking about the competition. When were we going to find out who won? Was there going to be feedback? How many people had entered? What’s going on with this thing?

So when I got the email shortly after I got home from work, it felt like someone was responding to my queries. And yes, we won! And yes, there was feedback. Amazing feedback! The judge was Kevin P. Keefe, vice president of editorial and publisher at Kalmbach Publishing Co., which publishes hobby and special interest magazines. He had this to say:

This team deserves a lot of credit for sheer passion and boldness in wanting to reach past the usual content silos. The first thing that struck me was the writing: fresh, direct, uncomfortably candid in some cases. I was struck by one of the editor’s stories about her journey to a new last name, for instance. Overall, the team shows an excellent grasp of some of the basics of magazine craft. Meridian has an effective mix of narrative stories, short pieces, infographics, and other attractive entry points. I very much like the full-page interludes featuring matching art and inspirational quotes. What a great way to support reader-friendly pacing! While I found the actual financials in the business plan to be extremely optimistic, the document itself was thorough, perhaps the best example of one I’ve seen in years of judging this contest. And the magazine itself has been given a beautiful, inviting, competitive design.

It’s a day later, and I’m still on a complete high from reading this feedback. It’s more than we ever could have dreamed of. This guy got it. He understood our voice and our design and our mission. And he particularly liked my story on changing my name! He was struck! We went from Meredith telling us our magazine was “ambitiously schizophrenic” to hearing that our writing was “fresh, direct, uncomfortably candid.” He liked the splash pages and the art! He thought our business plan was the best one he’s seen! (Although we’ll cop to it being quite optimistic.)

This magazine was the culmination of an entire semester of work between four editors, three designers and one publisher. We agonized over every detail, from the placement of the folio to the width of a dotted line. As our professor said to us at the end of the semester, it was “truly a capstone” of all our hard work. And we couldn’t have been happier when the magazine first rolled off the presses into our waiting arms.

But winning ain’t bad either.

If you’d like to look at the digital version of our magazine, here it is!