Bylines Briefs

Senior Alex Stone wins Murrow award

Alex Stone ('02), a senior majoring in broadcast news, has received a national award for investigative reporting from the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

He also received an award from ABC in the Radio National Individual Reporter of the Year contest, placing as first runner-up.

Stone, a reporter for KOA-AM radio in Denver, was honored along with Bob Newman, KOA's security expert, with the 2002 RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award in the local radio stations, large-market category for their series, "A DIA Security Report Card: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

Stone has been working fulltime as a KOA reporter since he arrived as a freshman and was an on-air reporter when he was in high school.

In the series of reports, Stone and Newman anonymously investigated security procedures at Denver International Airport shortly after the Sept. 11 tragedies last year.

Stone plans to continue working as the morning weekday reporter on KOA's Colorado Morning News and as host for the Saturday edition after graduating in December.

Students score at One Show
By Erin Cox

Above is one of a series of ads that earned Brandon Sides and Reuben Hower a prestigious Silver Pencil award at The One Club’s annual student creative competition in May. Their assignment was to create print advertisements communicating that the United States is a good country with a genuine concern for the rest of the world. Below is one of Amber Lashmett’s finalist entries.

A series of print advertisements by two recent graduates earned Silver Pencil awards at The One Show Festival in New York City in May, and three other CU student entries were selected among the 10 finalists. No other university won as many top honors.

Brandon Sides ('02) and Reuben Hower ('01) split a $2,000 award and were honored during a ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

The One Show annually sponsors the nation's most highly regarded college student creativity competition. The client for this year's contest was the United States. Entrants were asked to communicate through a series of ads that America possesses a genuine concern for people throughout the world. Sides and Hower's ads depicted people who appear to be from other cultures in typical American settings. Instead of copy, a family tree consisting of international flags subtly indicated that the United States is essentially a global community.

Besides the Gold, Silver and Bronze Pencil winners, 10 finalists were also recognized from the more than 500 entries, and three of them came from CU students and alums: Amber Lashmett ('02), a team including Jeremy Seibold ('01) and Adam Rand ('02) and another campaign by Sides and Hower.

The winning ads were displayed at The One Club in New York City during the festival. Also during the weeklong activities, print ads from more than 15 of the School's advertising students were showcased. CU was one of only five four-year universities in the nation to receive an invitation to submit student work.

"Winning was really fun," said Sides, currently doing a post-graduate internship at TDA Advertising & Design in Boulder. "It was our least-favorite campaign of the three we submitted, but it was the one we put the most work into."

In July, Hower took a position with Fallon Worldwide's office in Minneapolis, where he works on the BMW account.

He won a Bronze Pencil in The One Show's 2001 college creative competition.

Associate Professor Brett Robbs said further evidence of the School's growing reputation for producing top creative students was the visit in May from Flinn Dallis and Kara Taylor, creative recruiters for Leo Burnett Worldwide in Chicago.

"That more agencies are coming to recruit at CU during an economic downturn says a lot about our program's reputation," Robbs said.

The Scripps Howard Foundation has awarded $555,470 to the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder for renewal of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.

The fellowship program helps journalists better understand environmental issues and, in turn, they help educate the public, said Len Ackland, director of the center, which is part of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The five journalists named Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism for 2002-2003 are: Elizabeth Bluemink, an environmental reporter with the Anniston Star in Anniston, Ala.; John Flesher, the Traverse City correspondent for the Associated Press in Michigan; Douglas McPherson, senior reporter for New Hampshire Public Radio in Concord; Natalie Phillips, senior staff writer at the Anchorage Daily News in Anchorage, Alaska; and David Wilson, a free-lance radio producer in Boulder.

Volcic earns Devaney dissertation fellowship

Zala Volcic, a doctoral student at the School, was awarded a Thomas Edwin Devaney Dissertation Fellowship. The highly competitive award is granted to help free student s of all other responsibilities so they can work full-time on their dissertation.

The Fellowship covers tuition, fees, insurance and a living stipend for the 2002-2003 academic year. Volcic's dissertation research studies discourse among Yugoslavian journalists, activists and political leaders regarding national identity and ethnic conflict.