 "Photo: A Grant Snider Illustration")
Those of you who read this newspaper regularly should be familiar with Grant Snider's editorial cartoons in the Forum section of the University News.
Even less-frequent readers may have seen his front-page illustrations.
Now, Snider seems destined to enlarge his audience exponentially.
He has won the National Journalism Award as 2008 College Cartoonist of the year for his cartoons published in the U-News.
Each year, the Scripps Howard Foundation recognizes 17 outstanding people in the news business.
Snider is the only university student in the nation among this year's winners.
He will attend the awards ceremony April 24 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and share the stage with the 16 other journalists from some of the most prestigious news organizations in the country.
These include the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Boston Globe.
The Scripps Howard Foundation will hand out $195,000 in prize money during the evening's celebrations.
Snider, a second-year student in the UMKC School of Dentistry, will receive $10,000 and the Charles M. Schulz Award for "comic strips that reflect the influence of graphic novels," according to the press release issued last Friday by the foundation.
Paul Krugman (who also received this year's Nobel Prize for Economics) won $10,000 for his commentary on economic issues on the pages of the The New York Times.
In the category of "Washington Reporting," David Willman (Los Angeles Times) was awarded $10,000 "for revealing the FBI and Justice Department's botched anthrax investigations that ended with a suicide rather than an arrest and a trial."
On request, besides his regular panel in the Forum section on page 15, Snider drew a self portrait this week.
"I had fun with the self portrait," he said. "It includes all of my main motivations for cartooning."
Last year, Snider took home four awards from the Missouri Collegiate Media Association for his cartoons.
All of his prize-winning work is viewable online at www.unews.com by typing "Grant Snider" into the search window.
dsimons@unews.com
