Our Hometown would like to congratulate The Lakota Country Times on recently winning the 2010 South Dakota Newspaper Association’s award for Best Newspaper Website; and The Trinity Journal on winning first place in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s Better Newspaper Contest (4,301-11,000 circulation category).
The Country Times, a weekly newspaper located in Martin, South Dakota, and serving the Lakota Native American Tribe on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, had recently won the Native American Journalists’ Association’s 1st place Award for General Excellence in the Website Category and a 1st Place award for General Excellence in the Website category from the Associated Press’ Newsfinder service, a database compiling stories from all over the Internet from participating sites. According to their site, the paper is “the largest Lakota-owned and operated online and print independent legal weekly color newspaper.” Only in its sixth year, the various awards have surprised publisher Connie Smith, who said in a statement that "Our operation is like a tribal family, and we look forward to continued success in serving our tribal readers, as well as a growing readership all across the country."
The Trinity Journal, with a regular circulation of under 5,000, “beat all the big guys” in their competition, said publisher Wayne Agner of competing in a category where many of the other papers had a circulation twice that size. The competition ran from April 2008 to October 2009, and the Weaverville, California-based newspaper partnered with Our-Hometown in June 2008. In an April 2010 statement, Agner said that the website award was “particularly gratifying given the hard work we have put in to upgrading the site. We’ve added lots of features, and we are updating the site much more frequently.”
The Country Times and Trinity Journal both subscribe to Our-Hometown’s complete turnkey website service, which allows client newspapers to select a look and feel to their site, but provides the backend and support services to allow users to perform regular maintenance to their web pages. Through the Drupal content management system, Our-Hometown maintains articles, display ads, classified ads and special sections, along with other content. Our-Hometown services over 100 newspapers in 26 states and Canada.
