Star wins – on the double!

YOUR favourite local newspaper, The Southern Star, scooped two top awards this week.

On Friday night, this newspaper was named the Regional Newspaper of the Year at the Irish Print Awards, along with Webprint, which prints the paper.

Niall O’Driscoll, manager, Southern Star Creative, picked up the award with Webprint, at a special awards ceremony at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Dublin.

And on Wednesday of this week, Southern Star Life editor Emma Connolly picked up the ‘Headline’ local print award for mental health journalism.

At the Headline Media Awards in the Morrison Hotel in Dublin, Emma collected the title for her series on teenagers and mental health, which ran over two weeks, last July.

Established over a decade ago and relaunched in 2019, Headline’s Mental Health Media Awards recognise excellence in media coverage of mental health issues, celebrating those whose work brings to light challenging stories of mental ill-health and highlighting work across all media.

This brings to three the number of major awards won by The Southern Star this year. In May the newspaper picked up the Feature Story of the Year award at the Local Ireland Media Awards for regional newspapers in Athlone, for its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Whiddy Oil disaster, last January.