Two senior communications students were honored with a sports radio award nomination from the National Student Electronic Media Convention.
Arthur Dowell and Matthew Hiscox were nominated for Best Sports Reporting on Radio. They made it to the final round of applications amongst big name schools like the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh, Marshall University and the University of Tennessee at Martin. Tennessee took home the first place award.
This is the first time in many years that the campus radio station, Cougar Radio, has been nominated for a radio journalism award according to Assistant Professor of Communications Dan Kimbrough.
The duo’s audio segment, “Rail Riders Audio Postcard,” made it to the final round of competition.
The seniors were able to choose their own topic and chose the reconstruction of PNC Field, home of the baseball team, the Wilkes- Barre/Scranton RailRiders.
“It involved us going up to different fans and people working at the stadium to see what they thought of the renovations and what they thought of the overall atmosphere of the game,” Dowell said.
He said the class project was enjoyable when they were at the stadium talking to different groups of people. The hardest part, he said, was putting the audio clip together.
“The hardest part would actually be when we got the piece and we recorded everything, the computer was giving us such a hard time. The program wasn’t even working for us,” Dowell said.
They were able to work in media center manager Dave Thackara’s office to finish their project.
“Thankfully, we could do one piece of the project on this computer, transfer it over to Dave’s, and we put it on a timeline. What should have been an hour editing took about three-and-a-half hours because we had to work on two different computers.”
When Dowell first learned they were nominated, he was shocked. “I didn’t even know until I saw on Facebook that it said ‘Congrat-
ulations to the Station Manager of Cougar Radio for being a finalist.’ I looked at the post like 10,000 times thinking ‘What are they talking about?’”
Kimbrough said they had never had anything to submit to this contest from the radio station. Over the summer when the contest was accepting projects he decided to submit the Rail Riders piece “on a whim”.
Audio production, the class in which Dowell and Hiscox were assigned the project, had not been offered in over six years. Kimbrough said because of this nomination, and multimedia journalism in general, he hopes it becomes a more regular communications course.
“Hopefully we’ll do it again soon, but because of this I think audio will get incorporated more and more into some of the production courses,” Kimbrough said.