The NYCity News Service’s city-based coverage of the 2008 presidential election won national Online News Reporting honors in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards.

The News Service also was a national finalist in the Best All-Around Independent Online Student Publication category.

Student journalists from across the country submitted more than 3,600 entries in 39 categories. The awards will be handed out Friday, Aug. 28 at the Mark of Excellence Luncheon, during the 2009 SPJ Convention & National Journalism Conference in Indianapolis.

“This is a great honor for the J-School,” said NYCity News Service Director Jere Hester. “It’s a tribute to the hard work and vision of our reporters, faculty, and staff. Our election coverage was a group effort. We showed that teamwork is key to creating a converged, multimedia newsroom.”

Some 100 News Service reporters produced 40 multimedia story packages on Election Day, using words, pictures, video, and audio to paint a picture of New York on a day in history. The coverage also featured live video field reports, and an interactive map with pictures and audio interviews of some 300 New Yorkers talking about their hopes for the future.

The Election Day project, months in the planning, was inspired by a group of students who headed on their own to New Hampshire to report on last year’s primary. That led to school-wide coverage of Super Tuesday in New York, and, ultimately, the general election.

Hester said he also was thrilled the News Service was named a national finalist in the Best All-Around Independent Online Student Publication category. The News Service has won that category the last two years in SPJ’s Region 1, which covers much of the Northeast.

“The national honor recognizes our ongoing commitment to covering the neighborhoods of New York, and is an indication of how far our News Service – and our school – have come in a very short time,” Hester said.

The News Service is a web-based multimedia site that made its debut Feb. 12, 2007, and feeds student-reported news to various media. News Service work has been picked up by outlets ranging from the New York Daily News to The Huffington Post to such community papers as the Norwood News and the The Queens Courier.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which opened its doors in August 2006, is the only publicly supported journalism graduate program in the Northeast. The J-School is headed by Dean Stephen B. Shepard, former editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek, the largest business magazine in the world.