Communications alumni honored, faculty participate at BEA conference

A contingent of faculty, staff, students and alumni of the School of Communications attended the 2016 Broadcast Education Association’s (BEA) annual convention and Festival of Media Arts, which included the presentation of a first-place multimedia award to interactive media graduate Nick Margherita ’14 G’15.

Marghertia’s film, “Pressing Issues For Print: An Interactive Documentary,” won the Las Vegas festival’s Student Interactive Multimedia Competition’s Solo Category. His documentary examines two newspaper owners and publishers, David Woronoff of The Pilot and Tom Boney Jr. of The Alamance News, exploring their respective publication’s history, current state and proposed future.

​“Pressing Issues For Print” was one of seven entries submitted by School of Communications students to receive awards in the 2016 BEA Festival of Media Arts. A complete listing of the school’s award recipients can be found in this February 2016 news release.

One of those honorees, Mia Ginaé Watkins ’16, was also in attendance to receive her award. The cinema and television arts major, who graduated in December, captured third place in the Student Video Competition’s Music Video Category.

Seven communications faculty and staff members attended the Las Vegas conference, with several contributing as panelists and presenters. On hand were associate professors, Tom Nelson, Rich Landesberg and Vic Costello; assistant professors, Gerald Gibson and Nicole Triche; Associate Dean Don Grady and  Bryan Baker, coordinator of sound and video projects. Jeff James, chief engineer in Teaching and Learning Technologies, also attended.

The following list highlights the faculty participants and their involvement:

• Costello moderated a panel titled “Transitioning to a Networked TV Studio Operation and the Effect on Newsroom and Production Workflows, Best Practices, and Curriculum,” which included Gibson as a panelist.
• Grady served as a panelist during the BEA Assessment Boot Camp, facilitating a two-part presentation titled “Writing an Assessment Report.” He also served as a panelist for a presentation titled “Media Analytics: Tracking Audiences in an evolving Media Landscape.”
• Nelson was a panelist in a presentation titled “Media Convergence: Transitioning the Curriculum to Content Production Across Multiple Platforms.”

​In conjunction with the BEA conference, the team of Rajat Agarwal ’16, Sky Cowans ’16 and Andrew Steinitz ’17 participated in a student video competition, titled “War on the Floor,” at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show. Baker served as the team’s faculty adviser.

The School of Communications students competed as a team against Clemson University and Fort Hays State University and were charged with launching a social media campaign, creating a one-to-two minute promotional commercial, and producing a long-form NAB Show experience compilation video.

​While the competition’s overall winner will not be announced until after the long-form video’s May 31 deadline, the Elon team captured first place in the promotional commercial category.