Waynesburg University’s student journalists win national award
Waynesburg University students work on the layout of the student-run newspaper, The Yellow Jacket, which recently won a national Society of Professional Journalists award.
On left, Brandon Szuminsky, a communications instructor at Waynesburg University and adviser to the student newspaper The Yellow Jacket, stands with students after they won regional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Waynesburg University students hold an editorial meeting in the newsroom of the student-run newspaper, The Yellow Jacket, which recently won a national Society of Professional Journalists award.
WAYNESBURG – Waynesburg University’s student-run newspaper, The Yellow Jacket, recently captured a national Society of Professional Journalists award for a series of articles they published last year about the heroin epidemic.
Brandon Szuminsky, a communications instructor at the university and adviser to the student paper, said he found out about the award two weeks ago.
“Any time our students’ work is recognized is exciting, but to be judged the very best in the entire country is phenomenal,” he said.
The honor was the national student Mark of Excellence Award, in the in-depth reporting category for smaller schools, with less than 10,000 students. Szuminsky said it was the first time the school has won this award, for which they competed with 11 other regions in the nation.
“It’s hard to put too fine a point on this, but these four students wrote a series of articles that beat out every student journalist at every college and university with 10,000 students or fewer,” he said. “It’s an exceptional honor and a reflection of the hard work and dedication of student journalists at Waynesburg.”
The five-article series ran in the spring and fall semesters 2016 and touched on how heroin is affecting the community, the campus and even nursing students at Waynesburg.
One of the student writers, Teghan Simonton, 19, of Maryland, is the managing editor for The Yellow Jacket. She said much of its heroin series focused on the community, but she “wanted to bring it back to the university,” by interviewing nursing students.
“They have to do clinical hours in the community and learn how to treat addicts,” Simonton said. “They all had to learn not to stigmatize it and how to treat people with addiction just like any other patient.”
Simonton, who will be a junior in the fall, said she was shocked to hear the series won a national award.
“A lot of people don’t win an award like this in their senior year or ever, so it’s really great to have that under my belt and to put it on my résumé,” she said. “We all worked really hard on that series, and just in general, at The Yellow Jacket, we put in a lot of hours. It’s really great to see that payoff.”
Szuminsky said the national award was “a cherry on top of a good year” for the newspaper.
At the regional level, they won 10 SPJ awards, including one for their heroin series and for the best nondaily student newspaper in the region for smaller schools.
Szuminsky said the students will be honored for the national award, during SPJ’s Excellence in Journalism Conference in September in Anaheim, Calif. He said he is working with the college to come up with the funding to send two students to the conference.