Jordan Engbers

Hilary Fullmer

Jenna Mushro

Lindsay Phelps

Elizabeth Robinson

Olivia Young

This selective program brings together scholars and practitioners for two weeks each summer, to help bridge the gap between public relations practice and education.

Remund will spend  his fellowship in Birmingham, Ala., within the headquarters of Regions Financial Corporation. He will learn about corporate communication practices at Regions, conduct research on public relations leadership and teamwork within the organization, and deliver some coaching and training.

With $120 billion in assets, Regions is a member of the S&P 500 Index and is one of the nation’s largest full-service providers of consumer and commercial banking, wealth management, mortgage and insurance products and services.

Twenty-three Electronic Media seniors executed the last of 12 successful capstone newscasts May 9. Students began producing DrakeLINE during alternate Spring Semesters in 1993. More recently the activity has occurred each Spring.

Radio-TV Producing seniors in JMC194 were primarily responsible for technical aspects of this year’s newscasts, while JMC193 Broadcast News students reported and produced. Additional content was supplied by junior Broadcast News majors.

DrakeLINE 2014 seniors produce their first of 12 quarter-hour, live newscasts Thursday, Feb. 6. Until then, professors Evans and Lytle recover!

Click to enjoy the archived newscast, director’s script and behind-the-scenes pictures.

For a full list of winners, click here. 

Two months before the winners were named, 330 judges (magazine editors, art directors, photography editors and journalism educators) gathered in New York City for two days to name the finalists in 23 categories. More than 250 publications submitted 1,636 entries to the contest, which was established in 1966 by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME).

Among those judges: professor Lori Blachford, the Peggy Fisher and Larry Stelter Chair of Magazine Journalism at Drake University. It was her first time as a judge for the national competition. “It was a terrific experience,” Blachford said. “As a professional, and more recently as an educator, I’ve followed the contest closely because it’s the pinnacle of magazine journalism. But this was my first time to play a role in the decision.”

Blachford helped judge the entries for best magazine section. Each entry consisted of a section or department from three different issues of a magazine during 2012. The category received 77 entries. Fifteen judges worked together to narrow the field to the top five finalists.

“The judges were split into teams of two, each team with a number of entries to consider before the gathering in New York,” Blachford said. “My reading partner was Slaton White, an editor at Bonnier. One of his titles is Field & Stream, and I’m from the Dakotas, so we had a lot to talk about.”

Other judges in the category were from The Atlantic, Marie Claire, US Weekly, Redbook, Consumer Reports, Discover, Boston Magazine, Time, and Women’s Health, among others.

“They tout the judging as the largest annual gathering of magazine editors in the country, and it’s true,” Blachford said. “It was great to be with all these incredibly smart and experienced people and just immerse ourselves in the best magazine journalism.

“I was especially impressed with how prepared everyone was and how seriously they took their responsibility. Sid Holt, the chief executive for ASME, is the contest organizer, but he’s really more of a miracle worker, organizing that many judges (330) and that much material (1,636 entries!). It was a thing of beautiful.”

Lori Blachford (third from left) and 2013 service learning award recipients

Blachford accepted the award for her course Media Responsibility Over Time (JMC:066) and the service learning work the class does for the Iowa Radio Reading Information Service for the Blind and Print Handicapped (IRIS).  IRIS exists to bring the world of information to Iowans who cannot access the printed word because of blindness, visual or physical impairment or learning difference.

Professor Lori Blachford and her class adopted IRIS as a partner to provide a service learning opportunity that allows students to use mass media to not only provide a service, but to better understand the needs of a special population of media consumers.  Each day students read aloud news from local newspapers to thousands of listeners who may not otherwise be able to access news from their community because of visual impairment.

Since the beginning of this partnership in fall of 2010, at least 300 students have done at least one day of reading and some have also committed to other projects and volunteer opportunities for IRIS. And with a studio for reading right here on campus, students other than those in this course are now participating in this service opportunity.

Congratulations to Lori Blachford and all the students who have made a difference through this work!

Drake University also had two winners in individual categories. Meagan Flynn won the newspaper feature writing category with her article titled “Crew’s Biggest Supporter, 101-year-old,” which ran in the Times-Delphic last spring.

Ben Curtis won the feature photography category for a fashion article titled “On the Dark Side” for the Fall 2012 issue of Drake Magazine . Click here for a behind-the-scenes look at that photo shoot. 

Winners from all 12 regions advance to the national Mark of Excellence competition. National winners will be announced later this spring.

Drake also had two second-place finishers: Olivia Young in the best non-fiction magazine article competition with “Uncovering Sikhism,” the cover story in the fall 2012 issue of Drake Magazine. A photo by Carter Osgood for that same story earned second place in general news photography.

Region 7 includes colleges and universities in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri.

“While the newspaper categories are arranged by size of school, the magazine categories lump all the schools together,” said Lori Blachford, academic adviser to Drake Magazine and the Peggy Fisher/Larry Stelter Chair of Magazine Journalism at Drake. “That means our students are competing against much larger schools, so the fact that Drake Magazine was named best magazine in the region is all the more rewarding. I’m very proud of their efforts.”

The Drake Magazine issue submitted in the best student magazine competition was the Spring 2012 issue, which was led by editor-in-chief Erika Owen. Jeff Nelson is the editor of the Fall 2012 issue that earned one first-place and two second-place prizes. You can view both issues online.

That’s also Chris on the monitor, March 17, 2005

Parrish told the JMC173 Broadcast Reporting class WHDH was prepared to lead the coverage because that’s what their audience has come to expect on Big Stories from the NBC affiliate. It started as a slow news day. But then he spent the next 4 1/2 hours in the control room, assisted by several executive producers, many reporters and photographers, and the latest reporting gear.

“It was an exhilarating moment … especially when we learned the president was watching us (in the Situation Room) during the key moments,” he wrote a week prior to his class visit.  ”We even received a lot of emails thanking for us for our coverage.”

Parrish joined WHDH in 2010 following four years producing newscasts for ABC5, Des Moines.

Brian Wansink, a 1984 graduate of the master’s program, received the Drake Alumni Achievement Award. Wansink is an expert on consumer behavior and nutritional science and author of the best-selling book Mindless Eating. He is the director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University in New York.

Emily Abbas, a 1997 public relations graduate who received her master’s of communication leadership in 2009, received the Drake Young Alumni Loyalty Award. Abbas is director of customer value management for Aviva USA. She has advised the Drake chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America and the senior capstone class, and is on the University’s National Alumni Board.

Assistant professor Dave Remund, Ph.D., APR, has published a study in Public Relations Review, the oldest peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of public relations practice. The study, titled Integrating Evidence-Based Practices into Public Relations Education, tests a pre-professional teaching model typically associated with fields such as law and medicine.

By adding discussion and analysis of evidence-based practices to traditional public relations education, Remund and his co-authors argue, public relations professors would deepen and strengthen students’ ability to provide effective communications counsel, especially when it comes to social media. The study involved a quasi-experiment within public relations courses at three universities. Remund collaborated with Karen Freberg, Ph.D., University of Louisville, and Kathy Keltner-Previs, Ph.D., Eastern Kentucky University, to design and implement the study.