SAGE Magazine Wins Kroon Cup

A student-run magazine with bold ambitions, a quirky sense of humor and a commitment to investigating environmental issues that elude the climate-saturated media has won the Kroon Cup.
 
SAGE Magazine was selected by the F&ES community to receive the award for expanding the publication’s scope, reaching out to the F&ES community and giving students a bigger platform to feature their work.The actual cupwas carved out of black cherry from Great Mountain Forest by Joseph Brien from Kent, Conn.
 
“Running SAGE has been preposterously fun. I’ll miss it a lot,” said Michael Parks, who edited Sage with Aaron Reuben. Both will receive master’s degrees in environmental management on May 21.
 
To take advantage of their own generation’s preference for all things digital, the editors launched a popular companion website in October.Over the past six months, the website has received more than 20,000 visits—12,000 of them unique—from all 50 states and 137 countries.
 
The success of the website, though, spurred the editors to do something counterintuitive. Instead of shedding the print version, they used their new electronic publication, which is now unshackled from hard print deadlines, to actually expand its presence. This year the editors published 750 copies of a 106-page anthology, which 25 students contributed to—more than double last year’s staff.

“Getting the Kroon Cup was the icing on the cake. It’s sort of proof that we were having a new kind of impact on the community,” said Reuben. “This, frankly, was one of our major goals this year. We figured we couldn’t have an impact outside of FES if we weren’t first a resource for our classmates and peers.”
 
The editors were entrepreneurial in soliciting high-quality submissions on a low budget by running a young environmental writers contest. It generated more than 300 submissions for only $1,000, which will be divided among the winners. For the year, SAGE published over 100 articles by F&ES students.
 
SAGE also has been acknowledged by many prominent organizations, from Grist.org, to Fast Company, to the Smithsonian Environment Center, and through partnerships developed with other media outlets, its stories have been published by High Country News and Policy Mic and will soon be in Solutions Journal.
 
“I’ve been delighted by the creativity and editorial skill of Aaron, Michael and the SAGE team,” said Fred Strebeigh, an advisor to the SAGE staff and senior lecturer in environmental writing. “Time and again, I have come away with the feeling that these students practice a form of journalism that expands our national dialogue.”