Plastics News has recently been honored for podcasts, show dailies, webcasts, feature writing and design.

The most recently announced awards came from the American Society for Business Publication Editors (ASBPE). The Azbee Awards of Excellence honor the best writing and design in business-to-business, trade, association and professional publications.

Our winning entries include:

Podcast: Steve Toloken and Jeremy Carroll, for Plastics News Radio. Specifically, our winning entry was the program "Former Inmates Start a New Life at Carolina Color," which Steve spearheaded.

The podcast won the silver award for both the national competition and the Heartland region. This is a repeat win for our podcast team, they won a national gold award last year. (Also ... foreshadowing ... our podcast team won another big honor for a separate podcast this year. So if you haven't subscribed yet, you're missing something that's very entertaining, and now it's been honored in back-to-back years with a national Azbee award.

Show dailies: Our Fakuma show dailies also won a national Azbee this year. We received a national bronze award, and also a regional silver.

Here are links to digital versions of each of the three issues we did last fall at the Fakuma trade show in Germany.

This marks the ninth time that Plastics News has been honored by the ASBPE for show dailies, by far the most of any business publication. 

If you missed NPE2018 (wait, how did you miss NPE2018?), then you know we did daily reports there: you can find the digital versions here. We'll be doing dailies at Fakuma again this fall, and we're already planning on issues at the big K show in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2019.

I am always especially proud of our awards for show dailies because they truly are a team effort, involving everyone in our editorial staff, plus (in this case) our colleagues from Plastics News Europe. Well done, team!

Webcast series: Our weekly Plastics News Now won another Azbee regional award this year. This time it's a regional bronze award. This marks the fourth year in a row that PNN has won an Azbee.

Feature article: Senior reporter Bill Bregar picked up a coveted regional silver Azbee for his feature article, A new way to mold; P&G discusses 'counterintuitive' new molding process.

Detroit SPJ awards

Bill's Imflux coverage also won an honorable mention in the Detroit Society of Professional Journalists' annual Excellence in Journalism awards.

He wasn't alone ... Jessica Jordan, PN's art director, won a third place in the SPJ contest for magazine design. Jessica's designs have won awards every year that she's been at Plastics News, in the Azbee, Detroit SPJ and Jesse H. Neal Awards. So the streak continues!

Crain Editorial Awards

Finally, Plastics News was honored with two major awards in a very competitive contest sponsored by our parent company, Crain Communications Inc.

We go head-to-head with outstanding editorial staffs from publications including Automotive News, Investment News, Crain's Chicago Business and more.

This year we won two top awards! Jeremy Carroll and Steve Toloken picked up the award for "Best use of Multimedia to tell a Story," for the Plastics News Radio podcast. This time the winner was "Hansen Plastics turns to sticky notes to get more efficient," which Jeremy spearheaded.

Finally, I was very pleased to win the top Crain award for best commentary, for my Plastics Blog. I've been a finalist a few times in my career for this Crain honor, but this was my first win.

Congratulations to all of my Plastics News colleagues for this year's honors. We're continuing to work hard and we expect to have many more winners to share next year.