The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication will honor three alumni Thursday at its annual Gutenberg Celebration.
The department’s 31st annual event will take place at 6:30 p.m. at the Hunter Welcome Center and will celebrate Jordan Echols (’04), Julie Hays (’02) and Preston Watkins (’12), three JMC alumni who have excelled in their fields.
For the last five years, Echols has served as associate vice president of digital marketing operations at HCA Healthcare, in Nashville, Tennessee. Shortly after working at HCA, the biggest hospital owner in the country, the COVID-19 pandemic began. He navigated the challenge of no longer being able to reach audiences through print and exclusively through digital marketing. Before working at HCA, Echols spent a decade at Texas Health Resources in Dallas as director of digital engagement and marketing.
Hays is a multiple Emmy and Murrow Award-winning journalist who started just after graduating as an overnight producer at KWTX and eventually moved to evening anchor. She has forged her own path in broadcasting, where she chose to establish herself in a community and stay at KWTX. Since 2017, she has anchored her own daytime show “Midday with Julie” in Waco.
Watkins is a director of strategic accounts at WebMD in New York. Before working at WebMD, he was an account executive and digital manager at Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair magazine.
“It’s a huge honor and humbling experience to receive the Gutenberg Award,” said Watkins. “I remember being in school and looking up to the award recipients, asking for advice, and keeping those nuggets of wisdom in mind as I’ve advanced in my career. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to inspire today’s students, as other honorees have done in the past.”
The faculty selected the three honorees for their accomplishments in their fields, said Dr. Kenneth Pybus, chair of the JMC department.
“The idea is to find a way to honor our alumni and highlight the good work they are doing,” Pybus said. “But also, we want to hold them out to our students and say these are the kind of things that you ought to do and the kind of people that we want our students to be.”
The event is organized each year by Morris+Mitchell, JMC’s student-run advertising and public relations agency. Annie Kay Palasota, Morris+Mitchell account director, took the lead in planning the event and said the event is a way to honor alumni who are 10 years or more past graduation.
“It is also a really good chance for students to network and potentially meet their future employers,” said Palasota, a senior advertising and public relations major from Denton.
