All for her blog, Lucy’s Laboratory, junior Lucy Marco has spent one week without her cell phone, another wearing 1950s clothes and hairstyles, another eating a wholly vegan, gluten-free diet and a fourth caring for an egg as if it were her child. And it all paid off on Saturday when Lucy’s Laboratory earned a third-place national award in the NSPA Digital Story of the Year competition in the blog category.

Lucy said winning a national award felt surreal.

“I don’t even know it’s completely sunken in yet, but I feel pretty honored that I was chosen,” she said. “It feels good to have hard work be appreciated.”

While earning the recognition is a nice reward, Lucy said her favorite part of writing her blog is trying to make connections with her readers and seeing the finished product on the Shield website when it is finally posted. She also said she feels like writing a blog has made her a better writer and a better communicator in general.

“I think through trying to explain things in a way that’s understandable and funny, even when there’s a day that was really boring or hard, I’ve been able to find a certain personality and voice in my writing and expand on it. I feel like writing a blog or story like that should be almost like talking to a good friend rather than just a list of chronological events. It’s definitely challenged my imagination and skill set, but it’s given me the experience to improve on the way I personally write and maybe even the way that I present myself, too.”

Lucy, can you give us a preview of what the next experiment will be?

“I’ll give you a hint: gnomes.”

Gnome way are we going to miss that blog post.

NOTE: A shout out to MacJ alum Max Rhodes who was a national finalist for Blog of the Year for the second year in a row for his travel blog, Rhodes Traveled. In being a NSPA Individual Award finalist in 2019 and 2020, he joins fellow alum Stella Shenkman and senior Bella Russo as the first MacJournalists to be named national finalists in two different years.