What a year it has been, Lopers. 2025-26 has been full and exciting for The Antelope. We’ve gone far, both literally and figuratively. With our graduating seniors passing the baton off to the next leaders at The Antelope, we thought it was fitting to reflect on the past year.
We started the school year with many returning staff members. This strong foundation encouraged us to challenge ourselves and try new things.
This included submitting content for the College Media Association’s Pinnacle Awards, which ended up being a highlight of our year. In the Division II category, The Antelope placed second for Weekly Newspaper of the Year and also earned second for Best Editorial.
Our team traveled to Washington, D.C., for MediaFest25, a national media convention and competition, to be recognized for these awards. While there, we earned two additional national awards. The Antelope placed second for Best of Show Newspaper and 7th for Best of Show Website among colleges with fewer than 15,000 students.
Trying new things also included growing our multimedia content. Our video team created news packages and video content, which hadn’t been done consistently for a few years. This was a great expansion on our channels and website, allowing us to better reach more of the UNK community.
For the last year and a half, our newsletter editor and adviser have been hard at work behind the scenes, working on a new platform for reaching our audience. This semester, The Antelope was able to launch its weekly newsletter. While there were challenges to get to this point, we are excited for what the future of this communication channel will look like.
Our photo and sports staff put in extra time to get content out beyond our typical coverage. This included traveling to games and staying up late to get photos, videos and articles out immediately after athletic games. The positive response we received to this content was encouraging and showed us how supportive our readers and viewers are.
Our goal was and will continue to be to create valuable content for the UNK community. We do what we do for them.
Speaking of coverage, our reporters looked beyond the Kearney community this year. In October, our staff created a 24-page themed edition on Rural Nebraska. Much of our staff and the broader student population grew up in Rural Nebraska. It holds a special place in our hearts, and we know how important it is to our state. Getting to highlight those communities was a high point in our year.
While the physically tangible areas of growth The Antelope has seen this year are exciting, the less publicly visible areas have been just as impactful for us. With a seasoned staff, our time in the newsroom looked different this year. Production days were smooth, with our designers often sending the paper to print hours before deadline.
The newsroom culture was also evident. Our team had a lot of fun together, and while The Antelope is our staff’s job, it’s much more than that to us. Working together for the same cause, while also laughing and having fun on the side, has contributed to our success this last year and to The Antelope culture.
Many of our editors are graduating, but knowing where The Antelope is now removes any doubt about what the future holds.
We are a team, and we all believe in the same thing – the UNK community deserves to have its stories told. We are going to keep telling them.
