Christopher Habermann | Contributing Writer
On Wednesday, March 11, six Society for Collegiate Journalists (SCJ) students, along with Associate Professor of Digital Media and National President of SCJ Andrea Frantz will attend the spring National College Media Convention in New York.
With over 1,200 attendees and around 250 media sessions, these Buena Vista University (BVU) students have the opportunity to meet and work with media students from all over the country, as well as make connections with national media professionals.
“What I hope is that they come back excited and energized about what they are doing, and they maybe come back with new ideas that they can offer back to their co-curricular organizations like UCN, the Tack, KBVU, and Capture It,” Frantz said.
SCJ is an honor society for students involved in any media organization on the BVU campus. The core goal of this group is to encourage engagement and service specifically in the area of journalistic education and First Amendment education.
Students attending this trip include senior Scott Locati, senior Cassie Forsyth, senior Tyson-Jay Domingo, sophomore Justice Kempf, sophomore Kiley Wellendorf, and sophomore Kaylie Plowman. Out of these six students, only Locati has been to a National Media Convention before. His first event was in Philadelphia, PA, and the second one he attended was is in New Orleans, LA. Looking back on these two trips, Locati loved being able to interact with SCJ groups from all over the nation.
Locati has been given the opportunity to give a presentation at the conference with two other students from Robert Morris University (RMU). In previous years, he has been a part of presentations, but up until this year, he has not been able to speak at one. In partnership with the students from RMU, they will give a two-part presentation on how each school produces and creates their media news. RMU will present the first part and talk about SoundSlides, and Locati will cover the second part in which he will talk about how he uses the Adobe computer tools to create and spruce up his produced media news.
“Being in that scene and being surrounded by media professionals is really going to help me believe that this is actually going to be me in a few months,” Forsyth said.
Forsyth, who will be graduating this upcoming May, hopes to get a job in the music industry creating multimedia and design for musical artists. Being at this conference will provide her the opportunity to network with people outside of Iowa as well as possibly visit one or two record labels and try to speak with anyone she can there.
Frantz will be giving two presentations. The first one is title “The Top 10 Challenges That Student Media Are Facing in 2015”, and the second one is “The Great 2015 First Amendment Trivia Contest”. All six students will also be giving a group presentation over how to handle breaking news on the go with the use of social media.
“New York City is the media capital of, at the very least in the U.S., but some could argue the world, and the conference every spring celebrates the fact that New York is the heart of where media actually gets going. So what could be a better place to take students who are interested in getting into this business?” Frantz said.
