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By Viewpoints Staff
By Viewpoints Staff
Students from Riverside City College’s student newspaper Viewpoints participated in the annual Journalism Association of Community Colleges state conference March 30 to April 1, learning a lot, winning awards and having fun.
The JACC state conference brought together more than 600 students and faculty from more than 45 community colleges across the state of California.
The first event of the state conference was a journalism trivia contest. Staff writer Ben Kwiecien and former editor in chief Timothy Guy competed for Riverside on a team and made it to the final round before being eliminated.
Opinions Editor Anthony Whitacre and Features Editor Crystal Carry went on tours of the Los Angeles Times building and the KABC channel 7 studio and met news anchor Mark Brown.
“I was excited and it was really incredible to meet the people that work there,” Whitacre said. “It made me want to become a better journalist.”
The majority of the time allocated at the conference was situated around 70 workshops, with topics spanning from writing to photography.
Inscape Editor Johnathan Kroncke attended a workshop entitled “From sex, violence to pimps-rock music and the First Amendment” given by Mark Larson from Humboldt State University and had a good time.
“It was awesome,” he said. “He brought the First Amendment to light by using shock rock as examples.”
Another part of the conference were the 15 on-the-spot contests. Each of these contests was geared toward a specific topic such as sports photography, copy editing and news writing.
One of the events, team feature, consisted of a team of two, writer and photographer, working on a complete package of a story. At this event the teams were dropped off in Chinatown and told to go out and find a story.
One of the teams competing for Riverside, Managing Editor Monique Larkin and Photo Editor Chris Ullyott, found it to be difficult, but fun.
“I knew the competition was going to be tough,”Larkin said. “I just kept telling everyone to have fun.”
Guy competed in the headline writing contest with more than 50 other students, and came away with a second place overall award.
“It was a very interesting contest,” he said. “I did my best and was happy with the end results.”
At the end of each evening there were presentations of awards. For the first night, editors in chief from around the state were each given an award for all of their hard work and dedication to journalism. Editor in chief Joshua Duran was happy to receive this honor.
“I am honored to be included in the ranks of some of the most accomplished journalists in collegiate press,” he said.
The end of the second night brought awards for articles, designs and photos published last year. Duran won honorable mentions for a page design and advertisement.
Former Viewpoints photographer Mike Lewis won fourth place in Sports Action Photo for a shot of the RCC soccer team and an honorable mention in Sports Feature Photo of the women’s water polo team celebrating after a victory.
Viewpoints also won the General Excellence Award, which is given to colleges that exceed in categories of writing, editing, content, leadership, photography, design and advertising.
The final night of the conference concluded with the Bring-In awards. These were for contests where colleges were given topics and told to create different projects to match criteria in the areas of photography and design.
Duran won an honorable mention for a photo illustration about abortion. Working together, Guy and Duran entered and won third place for a photo illustration on abortion, second place for an infographic on abortion and an honorable mention for a Viewpoints recruitment advertisement. Teaming up on these projects is something Guy is proud of.
“To be able to work together with Josh on these contests and win is a great thing,” he said. “It just goes to show the outstanding teamwork this staff has.”