THE HEARST FOUNDATION

By Michael Tonos

They are considered the crowning glory for student journalists, comparable to the Pulitzers for their professional counterparts.

And Ole Miss, like many other universities, is using the prestigious Hearst Journalism Awards Program not only to produce winners but also to improve student skills.

“It helps raise the bar on the quality of student work,” said assistant professor Patricia Thompson, director of Student Media and the school’s contest chairperson. “It’s fun to compete with the best programs in the country.”

The contest, open to all accredited journalism programs, recognizes excellence in writing, photojournalism, broadcast news and multimedia. But beyond the individual recognition, the standards set by the awards program push everyone to do better.

“We have conversations with our students to guide them to produce outstanding journalism to enter in Hearst,” said Thompson, who has been at Ole Miss since 2009.

Will Norton, the dean of the Meek School of Journalism and New Media, praised the Hearst program for its emphasis on quality. “It’s good at getting students away from doing a few stories that are merely good to doing journalism of excellence,” said Norton, who has served on the contest’s steering committee since 1984. ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This year, the contest will put as much as $500,000 in the hands of students and schools in the form of scholarships, grants and stipends for participating universities.

The competition is funded by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, which operates under the Hearst Foundations. It is open to the 105 accredited journalism schools in the nation, and all but about 15 participate, said Jan Watten, the program director for the Hearst awards.

Unlike many awards programs, which have one deadline each year, Hearst has 14 competitions throughout the year, beginning in October and ending in April. Each school can submit two entries per category per competition. Ole Miss, said Thompson, usually submits at least one entry in each category.

This year’s program features five monthly writing competitions, two photojournalism competitions, three broadcast news competitions — one in radio and two in television — and four multimedia competitions. The top winners receive scholarships, others earn certificates and universities get $100 for each entry.

The entries are judged by media professionals. “The backbone of the program is the quality of the judges that we have,” said Paul “Dino” Dinovitz, executive director for the Hearst Foundations. “They’re leaders in their field. … They’re all at the top of their game.”

The national champions are selected from the monthly first-place finishers during a final championship, usually in San Francisco, but held in Washington in June of this year.

Since its inception 54 years ago, Watten said, the Hearst program has received more than 36,000 entries. About 10,000 have received an award or certificate.

“The awards program presents excellence,” Dinovitz said. “It’s no different from receiving an Academy Award or an Emmy or a Peabody.”

Norton agrees, calling the prizes “the Pulitzers of college journalism.” Its winners, he said, represent “the cream of the crop in journalism programs throughout the nation.”

Any type of recognition from the contest — financial or otherwise — is valuable to the students, Watten said. “It really does give students a sense of pride,” she said, “and it encourages them to continue in this craft.”

That was the case for Ruth Ingram Cummins, a 1982 Ole Miss graduate who was recognized for news writing.

“The award was validation that I was on my way to becoming a career newspaper reporter,” said Cummins, who has been an editor and reporter at The Clarion-Ledger for 27 years.

“I was thrilled,” she recalled. “A Hearst award was the biggest recognition we could receive. It was a very humbling experience, and to this day, I remember holding the award certificate in my hand and being in awe.”

More recent Ole Miss honorees, said Thompson, include:

Marianna Breland, who won fifth place for enterprise writing for “The Million Dollar Mile,” a 2011 article about towboats on the Mississippi River that was published as part of a depth reporting class.

Alex McDaniel, recognized for editorial writing with a piece about the controversy over selecting a new Ole Miss mascot. It was published in The Daily Mississippian when she was editor in chief in 2010.

Ryan Rigney, selected for in-depth writing in 2011 for his look at the first Iraqi-developed video game, published in GamePro magazine.

“It has been wonderful to see our students work hard for the national recognition that the Hearst contest provides,” Thompson said.

The overall winners, Norton said, leap to the top of the talent pool. He told of a student at another school who, immediately after winning a Hearst prize, was approached by a recruiter for a national media group. “The top media executives are looking and hiring people at the top level,” he said.

According to Dinovitz, the competition provides yet another benefit that will help students later in their careers.

“Our competition invites these kids to participate in the marketplace,” he said. “Competition starts at the school — only two will be submitted. From that point on, those two are winners. They’ve already made it through the first hoop. You learn something from the experience of competing. That’s what they’re going to be doing.”

Despite changes in technology, both Dinovitz and Watten say mastery of the basics remains the focus of the awards, which started as a writing program and now includes broadcast, photojournalism and multimedia.

“We honor and recognize the fundamentals of journalism,” Watten said. “The core fundamentals are very, very important. A student has to know how to write.”

The multimedia category was added five years ago, Dinovitz said, because technology is a “huge part” of the journalistic process. Still, he said, “The content and the quality of the work are the king and queen of the competition.”

And that commitment to recognizing the best college journalism is what pushes all of the participants, including Ole Miss, to shoot higher day in, day out.

“You never know what the judges are going to pick, and there certainly have been times when we didn’t win and felt we deserved to get the award,” Thompson said. “But the overall experience is worth the time and effort, for us and our students.”

The author teaches journalism and writing for marketing at Ole Miss. Tonos graduated from Ole Miss in 1973 and spent 35 years in the newspaper business, serving as executive editor for The Sun Herald (Biloxi-Gulfport) and managing editor for The Sun Herald, The Vicksburg Post and Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. He lives in Tupelo, where he runs JMT Consulting. He and his wife, Jane, have four children and two grandchildren.