By Mallory Sherwood, Staff Writer
The Journalism and Mass Communication Department garnered 24 awards at the Southwestern Journalism Congress Sept. 17 in Monroe, La. The awards were for ACU student media programs, the Optimist, Prickly Pear and KACU.
Dr. Cheryl Bacon, chair of the Journalism and Mass Communication Department, and three of ACU’s student media leaders traveled to Louisiana to attend workshops and an awards luncheon. Jonathan Smith, editor of the Optimist and junior journalism major from Tyler; Sarah Reid, editor of the Prickly Pear and senior electronic media major from Abilene; and Jennifer McMichael, former Prickly Pear editor and senior journalism major from New Braunfels, attended the conference.
Smith said he attended the convention because “it’s a good opportunity to see how others judge our work and to see what professionals [outside the academic world] think about our work.”
SWJC is a smaller-based convention intended for student media leaders and sponsors, not entire production staffs, to see how they rank with other big league schools.
“ACU has a smaller program than other members, yet we compete well and consistently; we’ve had a long history of it,” Bacon said.
ACU is in competition with much larger schools in the Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana region, such as Oklahoma University, Oklahoma State University, Louisiana State University, University of Texas at Austin, Texas Christian University, Texas Tech and Baylor.
The Optimist received third place overall behind the University of Oklahoma and UT at Arlington, which is good, Bacon said. She said that ACU’s broadcasting department unofficially led the competition after they tallied up the awards being given to each school on brochures, noting ACU took seven awards in this field putting them ahead of UT, Baylor and other strong schools.
“There were big schools who were really strong in radio and others strong in broadcast,” Reid said. “ACU was strong across the board. It says a lot about the professors that [our] students have been taught to be strong at everything and that convergence is working.”
