ARTIKA RANGAN NAMED WINNER OF 2005 "E. A. NICKERSON AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM" The UD Journalism Faculty has selected Artika Rangan as the winner of the "E.A. Nickerson Award for Excellence in Journalism" for 2005. The award goes annually to the student who, in the eyes of the Journalism Program faculty, has exhibited the highest standards of the journalism profession during the previous calendar year. The award is named in honor of Professor E.A. ("Nick") Nickerson, who established the Delaware Journalism Program in the early 1970s, developed many courses and curricular standards still in place, and successfully directed the Program until his retirement in 1991. The Nickerson Award usually carries a stipend of $200. Artika Rangan was cited for her outstanding work as an intern at two newspapers, the Baltimore Sun and the Wilmington News Journal. During the summer of 2004 she interned full-time at the Sun's Harford County bureau, covering educational, environmental, and legal beats. She published 55 bylined stories in the Sun and contributed to a series of articles exposing one of the largest gasoline additive contamination problems in the country. Editors at the Baltimore, Maryland, daily highly praised her independence; her ability to find interesting, important story ideas; and her diligence in the pursuit of all her assignments. In spring 2005 she was selected by the Asian American Journalists Association of Philadelphia to do an internship at the News Journal, where she wrote feature articles for various sections of the paper. She had worked for the Wilmington paper before. Between 2003 and 2005, she was a Community Advisory Board member at the paper, and in that role she published five editorial columns a year and attended quarterly board meetings. Throughout her college years she also freelanced occasional feature stories for the News Journal's "Life and Leisure" section. During the 2003 schoolyear she worked as a reporter and then as a National/State News Editor and an Editorial Board Member for The Review. She published more than 50 bylined news, feature, and entertainment stories, as well as editorial columns, in the campus paper. She interned in summer 2002 for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, writing weekly summaries about wetlands issues in the Mid-Atlantic area for the regional administrator. She has also worked as a volunteer for the Brandywine YMCA's Young Leaders Program, for the Delaware Community Reinvestment Action Council (which advocates fair housing and equal access to credit through education, outreach, and legislation), and for the Philadelphia chapter of the "Stand Up For Kids" organization (which aims to empower homeless and at-risk children.) At UD she had an overall GPA of 3.6 and in her English-journalism major, a 3.8.

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