by Molly Roe
Cody Nagel, a 2018 journalism graduate at the CoJMC, won first place in the sports writing competition of the 2018-2019 Hearst Journalism Awards Program. This marks the first time a CoJMC student has won first place in this category.
Nagel will receive $3,000 for this award. His project was completed as part of the alternative senior capstone course at the CoJMC and focused on how female athletes are more likely to achieve academic success at a quicker rate than their male counterparts.
The article, which was published last year by Hail Varsity, can be found at https://hailvarsity.com/s/3756/why-are-female-athletes-some-of-the-best-students-on-campus. Nagel said he is grateful the CoJMC alternative capstone course allowed him to explore this topic.
“This project was my independent capstone project last spring, so I am very grateful the college decided to experiment with that and I hope other students will be rewarded for their work in the future,” he said. “The independent capstone allowed me to take on and invest my me toward something I wanted.”
In a recent addition to the program guidelines, the first-place winner automatically qualifies for the National Writing Championship which will be held in San Francisco next June. However, Nagel was a spring 2018 graduate, and per program guidelines is not eligible to participate in the 2019 Championship.
Indiana University placed first in the Intercollegiate Writing Competition with the highest accumulated student points in the first three writing competitions of the year. They are followed by: Pennsylvania State University; Arizona State University; University of Oregon; Auburn University (tie); University of Maryland (tie);University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; University of Missouri; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Nebraska-Lincoln (tie); Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (tie).
The final intercollegiate writing winners will be announced after the completion of the five writing competitions and presented at the Intercollegiate Awards Presentation in San Francisco this June.
Judging the writing competitions this year are: Audrey Cooper, editor in chief, The San Francisco Chronicle; Dwayne Bray, senior coordinating producer/enterprise reporting unit, ESPN; and David Zeeck, former president and publisher, The News Tribune, WA.
The Journalism Awards Program, now in its 59th year, added multimedia to the competitions in 2010. The program also includes five writing, one radio, two television, and two photojournalism competitions offering up to $700,000 in scholarships, matching grants and stipends. 104 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.
