Missouri Journalism students win awards, scholarships in all five categories of the 2019-2020 Hearst Journalism Awards Program
Seventeen University of Missouri students, including a project team of 14, won awards and more than $10,000 in scholarships during the 2019-2020 Hearst Journalism Awards Program, which culminated recently with the 60th annual Hearst National Championships.
Called the “Pulitzers of college journalism” – the Hearst awards consists of 14 competitions held throughout the school year.
By Nate Brown
Columbia, Mo. (July 2, 2020) — Seventeen students, including a project team of 14, won awards and scholarships during the 2019-2020 Hearst Journalism Awards Program, which culminated recently with the 60th annual Hearst National Championships. Collectively, the students won more than $10,000 in scholarships.
Missouri School of Journalism student Spencer Humphrey, a runner-up in the National Television Broadcast News Championship, was one of five finalists in the television category.
The Hearst awards program – often called the “Pulitzers of college journalism” – consists of 14 competitions held throughout the school year: five writing, two photojournalism, one radio, two television and four multimedia.
With points earned by students during this year’s program, the University of Missouri won the fifth-place trophy in the Intercollegiate Overall category.
The following students placed in the top 5 in monthly competitions:
- Eli Lederman, fifth place, Sports, for a Columbia Missourian article on Mizzou Athletics’ “Make It Right” campaign.
- Tristen Rouse, fifth place, Photojournalism II – Picture Story/Series, for Missourian photos taken during the 2019 high school football season.
- Aviva Okeson-Haberman, first place, Radio News and Features, for “How Missouri’s Senate passed a restrictive abortion bill overnight” and two other KBIA-FM stories.
- Spencer Humphrey, fifth place, Television II – News, for a KOMU-TV Target 8 report on charity panhandling without a permit and one other story.
- Jacob Moscovitch, fourth place, Multimedia II – Innovative Storytelling and Audience Engagement, for “The Secret to Having the Best Summer Ever,” which ran in The New York Times.
- Armond Feffer, Rebecca Ferguson, Joel Green, Julia Hansen, Yanran Huang, Yehyun Kim, Sam Koeppel, Amanda Lee, Jamie Maron, Jacob Moscovitch, Matt McCabe, Liv Paggiarino, Tristen Rouse and Daniel Shular, fifth place, Multimedia IV – Digital News or Enterprise Story – Team, for the Missourian’s “Friday Night Sights: The magic and wonder of 2019 Friday night football.”
Rouse was a semifinalist in the Photojournalism category; Humphrey in Television. Ethan Stein, who placed sixth in the Television II – News competition, also advanced to the semifinals because a competitor was ineligible due to graduating in spring 2019. Okeson-Haberman, BJ ’19, did not advance in Radio because she too was ineligible.
All of the winning stories – told from the high school gridiron to the halls of the state capitol – were based in mid-Missouri, even Moscovitch’s New York Times story on two Columbians.
“My experience working with the two roller skaters taught me that as journalists and photojournalists, we must tell stories about people, not about their adjectives and identifiers,” said Moscovitch.
According to Hearst, this year’s program received a record 1,396 entries for the 14 competitions.
The Missouri School of Journalism is one of 104 accredited schools of journalism in the U.S. eligible to participate in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program, which operates under the auspices of the accredited schools of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Updated: November 13, 2020