UF alumnus John Cox won the William Randolph Hearst Foundation's 2008 national writing championship, the collegiate equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, in San Francisco on June 5.
The national championship write-off consisted of writing three stories in approximately 48 hours. The topic for this year's competition was specific methods sections of San Francisco were going green, Cox said.
He had previously been selected as the January winner in the Hearst Foundation's in-depth writing category. His story was written about the unsolved 2004 murder of UF student Sudheer Reddy Satti.
Cox, who received a bachelor's degree in journalism this spring, said he has been interested in winning a Hearst since he took classes with journalism professors Mike Foley and Ted Spiker. "They inspired me," Cox said. "It's really too much to explain how much they have done for me."
His award as the writing champion included a leather-bound certificate and a $5,000 scholarship.
