Journalism Students Stack Impressive Wins
Students from the Department of Journalism took home nine first-place plaques and 36 additional awards in national and regional competitions against other community colleges. The competitions evaluated student work produced in the 2023-24 academic year.
Inside Fullerton magazine won the prestigious Magazine Pacemaker Award from the Associated Collegiate Press, its third year in a row as a Pacemaker winner. The newly established Hornet Media group, which includes The Hornet student news outlet, Inside Fullerton magazine and Hornet Radio also won a Multiplatform Pacemaker Award.
“It’s an incredible achievement to win a Pacemaker award and be among the best student publications in the nation three straight years in a row,” said Mikey Moran, editor-in-chief of Inside Fullerton. “The hours our staff puts into brainstorming pitches, headlines and design all become worth it for moments like this.”
The project that got the most accolades was the three-episode narrative podcast “Everybody’s Doing It.” It won first-place awards in the College Media Association Pinnacle Awards and Journalism Association of Community Colleges SoCal Regional Awards– competing with two-year schools— as well as fourth-place for ACP’s Podcast of the Year award, beating out several four-year schools. The podcast tells the story of four young people who became creators on OnlyFans during the pandemic, contextualized with interviews from academic experts on the history of the porn wars and the labor of sex work.
An interdisciplinary effort, the podcast was reported, written and produced by journalism majors Mariana Escoto and Gerardo Chagolla, English major Julianne Le and photography major Aaliyah Skipper, with additional audio editing by radio student Jenny Kim and an original score by music major Andy Van Driesen. It was funded by an Emerging Journalist Fellowship from California Humanities and recorded in Fullerton College’s radio program studios.
“Working on this podcast was a great experience. All of those days and evenings working tirelessly to get people to talk to us, writing the scripts and trying to find a direction for the podcast paid off at the end,” said Escoto. “I’m grateful to have had a chance to shed light on something so important and present in this time and age.”
Other first-place wins include:
- Melisa Skinder’s page design of a magazine story on romance novels
- Rhodes and Quinn Cisneros’s curation of The Hornet’s sports page
Photography major Cesar Garcia’s photo of Fullerton College basketball player Christian Watson won first place for sports action photo in the College Media Association’s 2024 Pinnacle Awards, competing with other two-year college students around the nation.
While the student journalists were recognized for their writing, reporting and photography, the categories they earned the most awards in were design and multimedia. Entries included a profile video and story on a local musician, a feature video on the 50-year anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons, a news video on the college’s new crime lab, social media reporting on the AA-GE requirement controversy and a photo essay of a city track meet.
“We’ve developed partnerships with other programs at the college–including the art department, printing tech, music, photography, radio and cinema,” said Jessica Langlois, journalism department coordinator and adviser to The Hornet and Inside Fullerton. “Many students get hands-on training in these other departments, and we then teach them how to apply that to journalism in our courses. So, these awards recognize those departments, as well.”
Former Hornet managing editor Sara Leon earned fifth place in the College Media Association’s annual Reporter of the Year competition against other community college journalists. She also took home awards for her weekly Hornet newsletter and her profile of the Fullerton College engineering club that won a NASA competition.
“I never thought that I would be able to go from jumping into The Hornet with no experience in journalism whatsoever, to now leaving it having won fifth place against other community college students in the nation,” Leon said. “It is a humbling, yet prideful experience to have won that award to say the least.”
The Fullerton College journalism program is the oldest collegiate journalism program in Orange County and one of the oldest in the state. The Hornet newspaper is currently a fully digital operation, publishing multiple stories weekly and garnering over 20,000 unique monthly views during the fall and spring semesters.
Students who wish to join the staff of one of the student media outlets can register for the following classes:
- JOUR 222: News Media Production
- JOUR 132: Magazine Production
- CRTV 145: Sports Broadcasting
- CRTV 129: Broadcast News.
To learn more about the journalism program at Fullerton College, visit the Department of Journalism’s website.
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