Former Observer intern wins national journalism award

Photo courtesy of Annie Will

Madeline Will, a junior at UNC Chapel Hill and 2011 summer intern at the Observer, was one of nine college students from across the country to win the Roy W. Howard National Collegiate Reporting Competition.

The annual contest, which was started in 1984, is sponsored by the Scripps Howard Foundation and its prize helps young journalists understand international affairs.

Will and the other eight winners will go on an expense-paid trip to Japan in May with Joseph Coleman, the Indiana University School of Journalism Roy W. Howard Professor of Practice. Coleman was formerly the Associated Press bureau chief in Tokyo.

Will is from Huntersville and graduated from Hopewell High in 2010. She interned for the Communities desk at the Observer and mostly wrote for the Mooresville and Lake Norman sections.

At UNC, she's a journalism and political science major and has written for The Daily Tar Heel for the past three years, including a year as an assistant state and national editor.

Will has also interned at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and plans to intern for Reuters in New York this summer.