The Center for Innovation in College Media (CICM), a nonprofit think tank created to help college news organizations adapt in the new media environment, is getting ready for its annual student media online journalism contest.
Winners will be recognized on CICM’s Web site, will get a badge for their own Web site and will receive a certificate noting their achievement. The CICM site gets about 300 to 400 viewers per day, so while it is a niche site, it has a lot of readership from .edu domains around the country.
The deadline for submitting contest entries, which must be from the 2008-09 school year, is Friday, May 15. Each college media publication can submit up to two entries per category. This year, the contest has been opened up to international college media outlets as well.
I spoke with one of the contest’s founders, Bryan Murley, who helps run Innovation in College Media, CICM’s blog. He noted that CICM is looking to work with other organizations to make the recognition “worth” more.
It seems to be worth a lot, though, given the experience of last year’s list of judges, which included Matt Waite, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times news technologist; Richard Hernandez, multimedia specialist with the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury-News; fellow Tidbits reporter Will Sullivan, interactive director, St. Louis Post-Dispatch; David Cohn, founder of spot.us; and Joe Weiss, creator of SoundSlides. Murley said he has not yet lined up this year’s judges, but plans on having some of the same judges from last year.
Unlike other contests that may only have one or two categories recognizing students’ online work, the CICM contest includes 22 Web-related awards to help encourage innovative multimedia and social networking projects. Categories include “best video package,” “best use of mapping” and “best use of social networking sites.”
Murley noted the importance of recognizing innovative multimedia work during these tough times, saying, “Everyone seems to understand the severity and nature of the problems facing news media now, and that’s quite a change from when I started writing the blog in late 2005.”
If you are a journalism professor looking to bolster students’ spirits, or a savvy student who sees a future in online journalism, check out the CICM contest submission site and think about what entries you can submit.
