After a quick trip to Dallas, Texas, The Hillsdale Forum walked away with its second award for Best Layout and Design in four years.
The Forum is a student-run opinion magazine funded by the Collegiate Network, a long-running program of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. At most college campuses, the CN-funded publication is a conservative outlet for students whose voice won’t be heard in the institutional campus paper. Although at Hillsdale this is less of a problem, Editor-in-Chief junior Chris McCaffery sees the magazine as providing an outlet that other campus publication do not.
“I try not to define The Forum in opposition to other publications,” McCaffery said. “It’s not creative writing, and it’s not the Collegian. The Forum allows students to take what they learn in class and be the vehicle for an intellectual conversation to happen in a constructive way.”
The magazine won the same award in 2012. Collegiate Network rules state that a publication cannot win the same award in back to back years. McCaffery noted the winning the same award under different leadership reveals that magazine’s ongoing improvement, thanks to the hard work of his staff now and staffs of past years.
“This proves some consistency,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest things I wanted to make a focus was a consistent, good looking design that’s easy to attain. People were walking up to us all weekend saying, ‘This is amazing.’ We’re lucky because most of the magazines are designed by their editorial staff, and we’ve had a separate design staff for four years.”
This is Meg Prom’s second year at The Forum, and she is now the head designer of the publication. Even in this small amount of time she has seen the magazine evolve and flourish.
“Under the leadership of [former Forum Editor-in-Chief senior] Wes Wright and Chris McCaffery, the identity and purpose of the magazine have become a lot clearer and the process of putting everything together has become far more organized,” she said in an email.
