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Student Success

Miami students win three national SPJ Mark of Excellence awards

First-place honors include campus reporting, feature writing, and sports writing

Student Success

Miami students win three national SPJ Mark of Excellence awards

Miami University students won three national awards and two finalists awards in the annual Mark of Excellence competition sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists.

“Our students are doing important, thoughtful reporting on the communities they cover during a time of heightened mistrust of news media,” said Rosemary Pennington, coordinator of journalism at Miami University. “The journalism faculty is proud of all they have accomplished and we're thrilled their work has been recognized in this way by SPJ."

Picking up first-place honors were:

  • Campus Reporting – for stories by Sean Scott of The Miami Student about cultural diversity in Miami performing groups and other columns
  • Feature Writing (Large 10,000+) – Lily Wahl and Taylor Stumbaugh  of The Miami Student for  “Miami …. Merged”
  • Sports Writing (Large 10,000+) – Jack Schmelzinger of The Miami Student for “Ryland Zaborowski doesn’t let autism stop him from crushing baseballs”

Students selected as finalists were:

  • Best Use of Multimedia – Ryann Beaschler on Medium.com that was part of a multimedia journalism class taught by Rosemary Pennington 
  • Cultural Criticism – Lily Wahl  of The Miami Student for her literary reviews

Miami won one national MOE award in 2019 – a reported essay titled “Ái (爱) to Love and Ái (挨) to Suffer” by Erin Glynn ’20.