by Kaitlin Van Loon
Senior broadcasting and sports media and communications double major Allie Snow entered two radio projects from a course taught by Professor Barney McCoy into the Hearst Media Competition on a whim.
The Tekamah, NE native hadn’t planned on entering because she didn’t have a lot of experience in radio. Her two entries were actually adapted from video projects. And it's a good thing she did because she now gets to compete in the Hearst national championship this June. Her entries are titled “Black Business Owners in Lincoln: Where are they?” and “Measuring Diversity on the UNL Campus.”
“For my UNL diversity piece, I had seen the statistic that UNL was the most racially diverse it has ever been, but to me, it still didn’t seem diverse,” Snow said “I wanted to hear from other people on campus what they thought and find out what if they thought we have a diverse campus.”
Snow’s report on Lincoln black business owners began because it was something she’s always been interested in. She called The City of Lincoln to collect those statistics, and they told her they had no idea because they hadn’t updated that stat since 2013.
“It’s actually a story I was keeping as a backup, but when they told me there weren’t any current statistics, I knew it was something I needed to cover,” Snow said “They even told me to let them know the numbers I gathered once my story was done.”
Snow has also tied for national second place honors in the Broadcast Education Association's Festival of Media Arts competition in the TV News Short Feature Story category for her report, "What it Means to be a Black Business Owner in Lincoln.” She’ll attend BEA’s annual convention in Las Vegas, April 18-21.
This year’s BEA Festival of Media Arts winners were selected from a pool of more than 1,750 entries. The students represented more than 300 colleges and universities in the BEA’s national and international media competition of student and faculty creative work. BEA is the premiere international academic media organization with more than 2,500 individual and institutional members worldwide.
“We are so thrilled for Allie and her hard work as a broadcast news student in our college. To be recognized as one of the best nationally by the Hearst Journalism Awards judges is an exceptional honor and acknowledgement of Allie’s work ethic,” McCoy said.
