Sunderland Echo - Awards and Recognition

Awards and Recognition

The Echo has won numerous accolades, as well as government praise, for its campaigning journalism, specialist writing, community work, photographic images and appeals for good causes over the decades. Examples of notable writing include a 2006 campaign highlighting the threat posed by bogus callers to the elderly and a 2005 campaign to protect 999 crews from being attacked on duty, which both received official praise in Parliament. A 1996 drug education campaign, which included the creation of a telephone service for tip-offs about suspected local drug dealers, was also highly praised. The Newspaper Society named the Echo as its Campaigning Newspaper of the Year for the Drug Busters drive, and the campaign also won an award from the International Newspaper Marketing Association.

In the 135 years of its existence, the Echo has become part of the culture of the North East of England and a replica branch office of the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette was built at the open air Beamish Museum in County Durham in 1991. Designed to show visitors how the newspaper would have operated in around 1913, the life-size exhibit includes a distribution office, reporter's office, stationery shop and fully working printing press. The replica office took museum staff several months to research and create, and was opened by Sir Richard Storey, great-grandson of Echo founder Samuel Storey, on 10 May 1991.

A racehorse was named after the paper in 1991, which was owned by a consortium of 250 Echo readers. The gelding won races at Hamilton, Redcar, Newcastle upon Tyne and Haydock in the early 1990s, but had to be put down on 17 February 1996 after pulling up badly lame during a routine morning gallop. The Echo was also used in a display at the Science Museum in London in 1999, to show how writing can be made simpler for people with reading difficulties, and a specially printed edition of the newspaper appeared on the TV show Touching Evil, starring Robson Green, in the same year.