Nicki Venter, a designer of Group Editors and Oudtshoorn Courant’s sales representative Jo-Marie de Kock excelled at the annual Caxton Excellence Awards ceremony in Johannesburg last week with their winning advertisement entry, Skroot.
The advertisement won the category for Best Design and Written Medium Sized Advertisement, out of 181 entries.
Nicki and Jo-Marie’s very creative submission for the 2009 Caxton Awards received the following comment from the judges: "The design is strong and great use is made of colour to emphasise the logo, special deal and headline. A unique approach was used to achieve brilliant impact."
This year’s 21st Caxton Excellence Awards received almost 1 700 entries from 123 community newspapers from all over South Africa for 37 different categories.
A total of R221 000 in prize money was up for grabs, of which the winning Journalist and Field Salesperson of the Year each received R26 000 and the Telesalesperson of the Year R15 000.

Top 10 photos for Group Editors
The photographs of three journalists of Group Editors, Michelle Pienaar of the George Herald and Jaco Human and Christo Vermaak of the Oudtshoorn Courant were placed in the top 10 for the categories Best Hard News Photograph and Best Feature Photograph. A total of 151 photos were entered for the hard news cate-gory and 158 photos for the feature category.

Michelle Pienaar’s photo, After the Storm, which braced the front page of the George Herald on 2 July 2009, received a ‘highly commended’ under the top 10 in the category Best Hard News Photograph.
It depicts an image of a devastated woman after her house in the Thembalethu township in George was flattened during a storm at the end of June last year.
Jaco Human also received a placement under the top 10 for the category Best Hard News Photograph with his photo Broken Lives. Jaco’s photo relates to the death of Sanet Wentzel on 7 November after she was run over by a car on the road to the Cango Caves. The image depicts her emotional daughter, Monique and her husband, Mark at the spot where Sanet lost her life.
Christo Vermaak, editor of the Oudtshoorn Courant, received a placement under the top 10 for his photo, Run from Fire for the category Best Feature Photograph.
Christo took his photo during a practice run with the police and army officials where an error in the throw of the shock and smoke grenades had the officials running for cover.

Article: Michelle Pienaar


Broken Lives by Jaco Human.



After the Storm by Michelle Pienaar.