SMU Journalism Students Take Top Online And TV Reporting Honors At Society of Professional Journalists Regional Competition, April 9
Students will advance to national competition in September
SMU journalism students brought home two first-place awards and two second-place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists Region 8 Mark of Excellence luncheon held April 9 in Norman, Oklahoma. The Region 8 competition covers all colleges and universities in Texas and Oklahoma. SMU’s two first-place winners now advance to the national SPJ competition. National winners will be announced in early May and recognized at the national SPJ convention in September in New Orleans.
Student reporters for SMU-TV and both The Daily Mustang online news site and the campus newspaper, The Daily Campus, were among the winners.
“Coupled with The Daily Campus's smashing success at the recent Texas Intercollegiate Press Association contest, the SPJ contest results show that our students are producing top-caliber journalism that is competitive at the highest state, regional and national levels,” said Jake Batsell, SMU assistant professor of journalism and Daily Mustang faculty adviser. “Our talented, hard-working students deserve every ounce of this well-deserved recognition.” (For more on the recent TIPA awards, see http://www.smu.edu/News/2011/journalism-awards-04april2011.aspx)
The SPJ winners, with excerpts from their letters of nomination, are as follows:
* 1st Place, Online News Reporting - Daily Mustang and Daily Campus staffs, "NOLA Now"
Four days after the start of the fall 2010 semester, the SMU Division of Journalism sent five students - Nicolette Schleisman, Kassi Scott, Sarah Bray, Josh Parr and Hayley Nelson - from Executive-in-Residence Lucy Scott's Broadcast II class to New Orleans in a two-car caravan for a real-world experiment in mobile journalism. For the next three days, they comprehensively documented Hurricane Katrina’s fifth anniversary in multi-platform fashion, filing a flurry of stories, blog posts, photos and videos from the field while smudailymustang.com staffers back home published the content as part of the “NOLA Now” project.
The Daily Mustang operates separately from the campus newspaper, The Daily Campus. But in this case, because students in the class worked for both The Daily Mustang and The Daily Campus, the rival publications chose to work together. They jointly developed a shared “NOLA Now” graphic and linked to each other’s work. It was inspiring to watch the students set competitive rivalries aside and put the story first, reflecting a trend of collaboration happening elsewhere in the news industry.
The project’s primary landing page was the “NOLA Now” Blog, which published more than 20 posts full of multi-platform content. But these three installments were particularly memorable:
• Josh Parr, Kassi Schmitt and Nicolette Schleisman tracked down and interviewed Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the main character of the first-year SMU common reading
• Zeitoun drove the students around the city and showed them where key moments in the book took place
• Kassi Schmitt filed this empathetic blog post from the Ninth Ward: “… homes still stand abandoned and destroyed: roofs are collapsed in, windows shattered, garbage piled high and doors are boarded shut. Many families have not returned, leaving desolate and abandoned homes to stand on the block.”
• Using a handheld Flip camera, Sarah Bray interviewed New Orleans natives at the legendary Camellia Grill, where 82-year-old Charles Bookch lamented that the city he knew and loved is “gone.”
* 1st Place, Television General News Reporting - Bridget Bennett, SMU-TV, "County Jail Health Crisis?"
Bridget Bennett thought the issue of health care went much further than just the average taxpayer. What about the prisoners in the local jail? Under the guidance of Broadcast I instructor Pam Harris, Bennett investigated this and actually beat the local media on the subject. She talked with former inmates and the sheriff's department, and her stand-up was inside the city jail. She shot, wrote and edited the entire package on her own. View the news package here.
* 2nd Place, Best Affiliated Web Site - SMU Daily Mustang staff; Aida Ahmed, managing editor
The Daily Mustang's readership and influence has grown rapidly since launching from scratch in the fall of 2008. From Day One, our students made clear that they would not be content with merely creating a “class website” to publish homework assignments. Our students understand that news has become a two-way conversation, and they wanted to build a virtual community that would serve as a one-stop hub for SMU news. In 2010, working with SMU-TV, the Mustang has sent students to New Orleans to cover the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. We’ve sent them around the city of Dallas to dig deeper into under-covered neighborhoods. Students covered the NBA All-Star game in Dallas and landed an extended video interview with actress Glenn Close. They harnessed real-time technology to their advantage, using Twitter hashtags, CoverItLive, Qik and Ustream to bring readers instant coverage of events ranging from the Bush Library groundbreaking to Student Senate meetings to football games. When professional journalists visit our Journalism Complex, they often remark that The Daily Mustang embodies what a 21st century newsroom should be.
* 2nd Place, Online In-Depth Reporting - "Are 'Dry' Neighborhoods On Their Way Out?"; SMU Daily Mustang; Ariana Garza, Lisa McKeague, E'Lyn Taylor, Kassi Schmitt
During the fall 2010 semester, as part of a project called “Beyond the Bubble,” Advanced Reporting instructor Jayne Suhler challenged her students to venture beyond the comfy confines of SMU and find compelling news stories in under-covered Dallas neighborhoods. As part of that project, students Garza, McKeague and Taylor combined for a three-part series previewing the pros and cons of the wet/dry debate. Broadcast II student Kassi Schmitt also produced a daily broadcast segment previewing the vote on the morning of the Nov. 2 elections.