The Fresno City College Rampage staff attended the North Californian Journalism Association of Community Colleges conference Saturday. The Rampage received General Excellence for print and online publication, as well as a Meritorious Award for in-depth reporting for the ‘Green’ issue published last semester.
Editor-in-chief Joseph Rios won five awards, including two fourth places and three honorable mentions, and last semester’s entertainment editor Cody Gless also received an award for his opinion story on the military’s on-campus recruiting practices.
The conference took place at California State University San Jose with “New Journalism: We have seen the future and it looks a lot like Starbucks” as the keynote address.
As San Jose State professors Cynthia McCune and Steve Sloan discussed how the internet is changing the media landscape, a flock of photographers hurriedly took photos to submit for the on-the-spot photo competition.
Meanwhile, the audience at large, full of journalists from California’s northern community colleges listened attentively, for all writing competitions were based on the keynote address as well.
The speakers discussed how new programs like twitter, a program designed to support many short-bulletin posts from many users, are being used in conjunction with other mediums, like video, to allow users to do such things as comment on a political debate in a blog-like fashion as the debate is being watched, with posts appearing like subtitles to the video.
The speakers then said that the future of media is in a way like going to Starbucks because an individual can choose to a relatively specific degree what he or she would like. Be it grande, with cinnamon, hard-line conservative or a third party, the future of media caters to niche groups who know exactly what they want.
At the conclusion of the keynote address, students dispersed to the many workshops and competitions like The Power of Photojournalism: Why National Geographic Magazine Still Rocks and Voices for Justice: The Enduring Legacy of the Latino Press in the U.S.
The conference ended at 4:30 p.m. when students boarded buses back to their respective colleges.
