Peace Times students attend Charlotte conference

By Noah Jimison

A group of students from the Peace Times class went to UNC Charlotte to attend the North Carolina College Media Association (NCCMA) conference in Charlotte on Saturday, Feb. 25.

The students were freshman Kyle Stengel, sophomores Elijah Horman and Jacob Trump, junior Noah Jimison, and senior Brian Martinez and December graduate Dezarae Churchill. This is a conference held every year at different colleges to award the newswriters, designers and others involved in college media publications. At the conference, Trump won a first place illustration award for his “Cafeteria Riot” illustration that ran on peacetimesmedia.com in 2022.

Other Peace Times winners were Makayla Cook and Khalil Tompkins, who won third place for digital storytelling, and Michelle Porizkova, who won honorable mentions for digital storytelling and photography.

It also had a variety of 50-minute sessions on specific subjects such as podcasting and newswriting, with speakers from different companies including the Charlotte Observer.

Many different schools attended the conference going all the way from small schools to big schools. Students from Meredith College, N. C. State University and East Carolina Uni- versity attended the conference. For the awards, there were team awards and individual awards that were between small schools and big schools each for their own categories.

This was a great conference, because there were many places and sessions to learn from. This conference has been going on for many years and has been switched around universities in previous years.

Some of the other speakers talked about news writing and podcasting. One session I attended was with a news writer from Axios Charlotte. The Axios speaker showed us what branding was like and what they write about. They give us examples on their sports teams such as the Carolina Panthers, Charlotte Hornets, and Charlotte Football club which are their football, basketball, and soccer teams. Axios is a news website which talks about many subjects, such as sports, politics, economy & business, and technology related subjects.

There were also many different ways of learning how to podcast. While arriving at the conference, there was a student that gave us a tour of their student union and showed us their podcasting booths and other media classrooms.

While attending the podcasting session, the speaker Joni Deutsch, who is the vice president of the Podglomerate, taught us the different ways of podcasting and the steps to it. The steps taught were to keep it as long as you want, know what topic you are doing, and be clear in what you are talking about.

Podcasting can be taken into many different subjects, such as sports, news and politics. Podcasters should be consistent with what they are doing. They would have a host that would have the name of the podcasting show and would also have a co host. I learned that good podcasts would hold lots of information with short sentences and verbs.