Nevada Travel Network wins first place press association awards
In its first entry into the Nevada Press Association‘s annual awards competition the Gold Hill-based Nevada Travel Network was awarded first place in two of the three categories it entered.
The blue ribbon for ‘Best Writing Online’ was awarded to the monthly NevadaGram and First Place in the ‘Best Feature Story Online’ category went to David Toll for “A visit to the Belmont Mill and Hamilton."
The third category was Public Service and the Network’s candidate was the “Comstock Mining Updates”. However, the criteria required submission of material from specified months while the Updates (which report on Comstock Mining Inc’s devastation of Gold Canyon, Gold Hill and the Virginia City National Historic Landmark) are published to no set schedule.
Toll is also the publisher of The NevadaGram, which launched on September 1, 2001 as a teaser to bring visitors to the newly established website www.nevadatravel.net. Ten days later the Twin Towers came down and the NevadaGram went on the back burner as Toll and his wife Robin Cobbey concentrated on client work, putting Harrah’s Lake Tahoe and Reno online, along with the Reno Peppermill, half the Chambers of Commerce in Nevada and a dozen northern California wineries.
In 2013 the two relinquished client work and began an overhaul of the entire Nevada Travel Network website which is still ongoing. “We served up more than a million page views in 2014”, Toll said, “and we’re on a pace to outdo that this year.”
Toll was the recipient of two previous First Place awards from the Press Association. In 1975 he won for best Feature Story in a Weekly Newspaper (the Gold Hill News, which he published and edited) and four years later for Best Feature Story in a Daily Newspaper as Northern Nevada Bureau Chief for the Las Vegas Valley Times published by Bob Brown.
“I’ve been very lucky as a journalist,” Toll said. “I flunked out of J-School at UC Berkeley and so I wasn’t burdened by other people’s ideas. Here on the Comstock I was mentored by Bob Richards — he was Managing Editor of the Enterprise for Beebe and Clegg — when I worked for him at the Virginia City Chronicle. And to be a journalist here bestows the special privilege of participating in the powerful tradition of Sam Clemens, Joe Goodman, Dan DeQuille, Steve Gillis, Lying Jim Townsend and the dozens of others who have followed after them, including Beebe, Clegg and Bob Richards themselves.
“Helping carry that tradition into the 21st Century has been a great source of satisfaction,” Toll said.
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