CCSF brings home 15 awards
NEWS BRIEF
By Andres Velasquez
Special to The Guardsman
The City College Journalism department won a combined 15 awards at the JACC 2018 Annual convention held in Burbank, CA in a competition between 34 colleges on Mar. 22-24.
The annual three-day convention was held at the Burbank Marriott to bring together students and faculty from member schools of the Journalism Association of Community Colleges (JACC) across the state. There was a total of 34 colleges and 381 student/advisor delegates in attendance at the convention.
The Guardsman won awards in the mail-in contest for general excellence in its print edition and its online edition. The newspaper’s Julia Fuller won fourth place in “photo story-essay” and Melinda Walters won second place in “Illustration.”
Etc. Magazine, created and distributed by City College students, was also awarded for general excellence as well as an honorable mention in “magazine news feature” for Victor Tence. The magazine also won first place awards in “magazine design/layout” and “magazine photo” for Sara Edelstein and Kelly Conner respectively.
The school’s journalists that attended the on-the-spot competitions at the convention won awards ranging between honorable mentions to first place awards. The categories that the students won awards in were: creative portrait, editorial cartoon, feature photo, feature writing, news photo, sports photo, and team feature.
Illustrator and designer Mindy Walters of the Guardsman was awarded first place in editorial cartoon. She said, “[The contest was] very exciting because I’ve been working with the Guardsman for a little while now and have been put into similar situations to the contest where I’m given a very short amount of time to create an illustration appropriate for articles and it just felt like a natural extension of that. So I was pretty confident going into that.”
Sports editor for The Guardsman Peter Suter won fourth place in creative portrait and also was given an honorable mention award for sports photo in photography. “I was just able to put myself in the right spot to capture that moment,” Suter said of his sports photo entry.
Suter added that he “really just utilized the techniques that I had learned in my photojournalism classes and also just our journalism classes in general.”
The school has had much success throughout its years attending the JACC convention since 2000, the first year that JACC had the convention. City College became part of the Journalism Association of Community Colleges in 1998.
City College Journalism department chair Juan Gonzales, who has been the Journalism department chair since 1985, said, “They did surprisingly well, especially in on-the-spot competition; they really excelled.”
He added that he was impressed with their success considering many of the students are new to the program and still learning. “They are real success stories,” Gonzales said.
The 34 schools went to the convention for workshops, contests, meetings and more. They were able to meet professionals, make connections with others, and learn new skills.
Suter said, “It was a good experience for networking and for kind of getting to see where your peers were at and the kind of works they’re doing.”
Walters said, “I did not feel that there was a lot of places for designers and artists to really show off their skills compared to the photographers and journalists,” when describing that designers and artists did not have as many events as other departments.
The students were able to learn from a total of 53 speakers that were at the convention who presented workshops for students of the 34 colleges to attend.
The speakers were professionals, two and four-year professors, and student panelists/ leaders.
There were also 8 transfer universities and professional organizations present at the convention who tabled at the convention. The students had the opportunity to speak to delegates from the different universities and organizations.