Judges' Comments
	"We learned something we didn’t know about previously after reading this entry because Neal researched a profession invisible to most. This is a well-crafted and compelling tale."
	Alone on the Range

The winning themes in Cox’s Business reporting category reflect what a broad range of subject matter there is for Cox community newspapers.

This category’s winners have surveyed the economics of Pitt County, N.C., tobacco growers (twice); Colorado businesses dependent upon the deer and elk hunting season; Proctor and Gamble’s sanitary napkin plant in North Carolina; and this year’s winning theme, sheep herding in Colorado.

Even under the best of conditions, the life of a sheepherder would appear extreme, Shannon Joyce Neal learned in preparing her winning article for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

They live alone, dozens of miles from the nearest road without another person in sight.

Neal and Photographer Dean Humphrey traveled more than 600 miles on a January day and found just one sheepherder. Their guides, two former herders, took them to the herder’s camp, and others that that had been abandoned, to witness firsthand the conditions the sheepherders endure.

The cold and the solitude seemed overwhelming, especially for a reporter who spent most of her life in cities or suburbs.

Shannon Joyce Neal began her career as an intern in the Washington bureau of the Dayton Daily News.

She graduated from George Washington University in 1998 with two degrees, in journalism and Spanish language and literature, and joined the Daily Sentinel later that year.