WKU News

WKU’s School of Journalism & Broadcasting has won the Hearst Journalism Award Program’s Intercollegiate Multimedia Competition for the sixth consecutive year, and two WKU students have been named national finalists for the Hearst photojournalism championship.

WKU won multimedia championship and a $10,000 award with the highest accumulated student points from the four competitions in the 2016-2017 Hearst Journalism Awards Program. WKU students finished second and third in the Multimedia III/Enterprise Reporting Competition and fifth and ninth in the Multimedia IV/Team Reporting Competition. Earlier this year, WKU students finished first and fourth in the Multimedia I/Features and first and third in Multimedia II/News.

WKU was followed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Florida, San Francisco State University, Arizona State University, University of Missouri, Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and University of Oregon.

WKU students Harrison Hill, a senior from Louisville, and Gabriel Scarlett, a sophomore from Maumee, Ohio, are among six finalists who will compete in the Hearst Journalism Awards National Photojournalism Championship. Earlier this spring, Alyse Young, a senior from Redmond, Washington, qualified for the Hearst National Multimedia Championship. The championships will be held May 29-June 2 in San Francisco.

Scarlett finished second in the Multimedia III competition and received a $2,000 award. Lauren Nolan, a senior from Union, finished third and received a $1,500 award. In the Multimedia IV competition, the WKU team of Michel Noble Jr., a senior from St. Louis, Missouri, and Mie Hee Christensen, an exchange student from Denmark, finished fifth and received a $1,000 award. The team of Sawyer Smith, a senior from Louisville, and Kendall Norwood, a senior from Knoxville, Tennessee, finished ninth. The School of Journalism & Broadcasting received matching awards.

In March, WKU won the Hearst Intercollegiate Photojournalism Competition for the 23^rd time in the past 28 years.

Often called “The Pulitzers of college journalism,” the Hearst Journalism Awards Program, now in its 57th year, includes five writing, one radio, two television, four multimedia and two photojournalism competitions offering up to $500,000 in scholarships, matching grants and stipends; 106 member universities of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication with accredited undergraduate journalism programs are eligible to participate in the Hearst competitions. Schools accumulating the most points earned by their students in each category are designated the winners of the Intercollegiate Competitions. The final Intercollegiate winners will be announced later this month.

WKU’s School of Journalism & Broadcasting, which placed third overall in the 2015-16 Hearst program, has finished in the top five nationally in the Hearst overall competition for the past seven years, in the top eight for 23 straight years and won the overall national championship in 2000, 2001 and 2005.

WKU students have won 15 Hearst individual national championships since 1985 — photojournalism in 1987, 1988, 1991, 1992, 1996, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2016; multimedia in 2015; writing in 1985; and radio news in 2006.

Contact: School of Journalism & Broadcasting, (270) 745-4144