The Guardsman Wins 11 Awards at Journalism Conference

The Guardsman staff stand with their 11 awards from the 2015 JACC conference after the ceremony on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015. (Photo by Fran Smith/The Guardsman)
The Guardsman staff stand with their 11 awards from the 2015 JACC conference after the ceremony on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015. (Photo by Fran Smith/The Guardsman)
The Guardsman staff stand with their 11 awards from the 2015 JACC conference after the ceremony on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015. (Photo by Franchon Smith/The Guardsman)

By Audrey Garces

The Guardsman newspaper staff received 11 awards at the Journalism Association of Community Colleges regional conference on Nov. 7, after competing against 16 other northern California schools.

The all-day event at Sacramento State hosted approximately 220 students and teachers, some of which competed in on-the-spot competitions in addition to attending workshops.

The Guardsman staff erupted in applause and exchanged congratulations during the closing ceremony each time City College was recognized, which included a first place win for on-the-spot editorial cartoon and first place for news photo and caption, as well as being awarded for “General Excellence.”

Keynote Speaker

The conference began with keynote speaker Cristi Hegranes, founder of Global Press, sharing the story behind creating her worldwide company which trains women in 26 developing countries to become journalists in their own communities. Hegranes’ motto is, “Change the storyteller, change the story.”

Hegranes recounted her discontent as a 22-year-old journalist covering the Civil War in Nepal, mainly due to the conflict of interest in the government-employed translators she worked alongside, as well as her struggle to credibly cover stories in local communities as an outsider.


“Extraordinary journalism changes our world,”

— Cristi Hegranes


“The discipline of foreign correspondents has to change. 97 percent of their content is war, poverty, disaster or disease,” Hegranes said.

Global Press Institute trains women in foreign countrieswith a 100 percent graduation rateto become journalists for the Global Press Journal and Global Press News Service.  

“Extraordinary journalism changes our world,” Hegranes said, adding the importance of a journalist’s commitment to quality and accuracy. Global Press currently employs more fact-checkers than The New York Times, ensuring the content they release shows a local’s perspective while also upholding the truth.

“My biggest takeaway from today was when the keynote speaker said there are two kinds of people in the world, ones that just live their day trying to get through it, and others that seek out opportunities for stories,” Michelle Kelly, editor-in-chief of The Skyline View said.  “Because I feel like as a journalist, you’re a storyteller.”

Workshops

Hegranes’ powerful message set the tone for the rest of the workshops throughout the conference, which included a variety of topics ranging from social media to editorial cartoon drawing. A common thread was the role of responsibility that media plays to audiences, especially in the age of lightning fast information.

“We don’t manipulate people. Our obligation is to serve them,” Kel Munger, freelance journalist and adjunct professor at American River College said, during her sourcing workshop.

Alexei Koseff, Capitol Alert reporter for The Sacramento Bee, and Nikki Moore, from the California News Publishers Association, led a workshop titled “What They Don’t Want You to Know: Government Access and Reporting.”

“We want to see ourselves as watchdogs for the government,” Koseff said, who used his personal experiences as examples for how to cover government institutions, from school level all the way to the national level.

In another workshop, three Sac City Express staff members from Sacramento City College told the process of covering the fatal shooting on campus during the second week of this fall semester. The audience questioned the students and their advisor, Randy Allen, about how to handle sensitive issues that have occurred on their own campuses.

“Sometimes being a journalist means asking: how many people are we gonna piss off today?” Allen said.

Students traveled between workshops, meetings and competitions until 5 p.m. when Joseph Daniels, the Journalism Association of Community Colleges NorCal student representative, presented awards for on-the-spot competitions and pieces previously submitted by the schools from their campus newspapers. Daniels ended the closing ceremony with a nod to the importance of journalists in society.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world,” Daniels quoted from Tom Stoppard, “journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”


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Send an email to: Audrey Garces