University of Guelph-Humber
Each year, the Associated Collegiate Press recognizes excellence in student media with collegiate journalism’s preeminent award, the Pacemaker. Pacemakers are awarded in each category of publication — online, newspaper, yearbook and magazine.
Entries are judged by teams of professionals based on the following criteria: coverage and content, quality of writing and reporting, leadership, design, photography and graphics.
ACP contacted Kimberley Noble, adviser of 2015 Pacemaker recipient, EMERGE, for a Q&A. EMERGE was published by a group of seniors from of the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Ont. completing a capstone course. The publication won a 2015 Pacemaker in the feature magazine category.
ACP: Tell us a little bit about the editors and staff of your Pacemaker-winning publication.
Kimberley Noble: EMERGE is an enormous labor of love by graduating students in their final term of Media Studies at the University of Guelph-Humber. Ours is a hybrid degree-diploma program and the students take this capstone media production course at the same time as many are doing a 240-hour internship.
This means that students who elect to work as executive and managing editors of the magazine have 12 weeks, plus the exam period, to envision, plan, assign, design and produce all the content from scratch each winter term.
They work as part of an interdisciplinary course that involves 150 or more graduating students in producing media across multiple platforms, including the print and web magazines, social media communications, a conference in April and, as of 2015, Canada’s first-ever all-student no-entry-fee media awards program. All are student-designed and run with the help of four full-time advisors and four part-time resource staff.
ACP: How did the staff ensure the quality of the publication?
KN: Instructors and resource staff all have extensive industry experience that we bring to this project. The goal, however, is never to do this work ourselves, but to set high standards and keep telling students that they can do better.
We work hard every term to give them guidance, and show them how to improve their work at various steps along the way, without doing it ourselves. This is the most difficult, but most rewarding, aspect of this work. It’s far easier for experienced professionals to “just do it”. But it’s much more satisfying, and a greater investment in the future of excellent and responsible media, to provide students with the tools and incentive to do it themselves. That way, whatever is on the page, or screen, or stage, or streamed video at the end of the term is entirely the students’ work, and they take not only that media, but those stories about its production, when they leave Guelph-Humber and make t heir own ways in the world.
ACP: Is there any one issue, story, photo, package, etc. that stood out during the year?
KN: Last year’s print issue was particularly impressive because the student editors had extraordinarily demanding internships (one editor-in-chief had overnight shifts writing radio news copy) and yet they were determined to assign, edit and oversee the layout and proofreading of every single aspect of the 2015 print magazine, which they decided as a class should tell the story of what they dubbed the “condo versus culture” theme that is shaping the lives of young people in Toronto.
The story that stands out is one about the end of a waterfront club that that’s been demolished to make way for a condominium development. It ran as a print story in the magazine and a Vice-inspired documentary series on the web. What started as a story about a building ended up, under the guidance of the student editors and the dozen students who worked on it, becoming a saga of the social, technological and economic changes facing their generation.
ACP: Tell us about a hardship or obstacle you felt your staff overcame.
KN: The time frame for this course is brutal. When Guelph-Humber Media Studies program head Jerry Chomyn first invited four media instructors to develop a curriculum to fit his vision of a hands-on multimedia fourth-year interdisciplinary course, research showed that most universities and colleges require at least two terms to accomplish what we set out to do in one. Students who work on EMERGE must hit the ground running.
This is especially hard for the print magazine team because we require that they have everything done by the end of April, with a mid-May fallback for students who choose to continue proofreading galleys in their own time after the term ends. Once the student editors have signed off, instructors don’t touch what they have produced, except to ensure that the files are free of errors that will disrupt the press run. So it’s an incredible pressure-cooker of a sprint to the finish each year, to mix the metaphors, but the students and advisors pull it off together in the end because we have come to see what a difference this process can make in our graduates’ lives. At Guelph-Humber, we are known as the “EMERGE survivors”.
ACP: What qualities will you remember the most about this Pacemaker-winning staff?
KN: Tenacity, and an amazing dedication to their own standards of quality. Also the ability to inspire and organize themselves and their classmates beyond what I, as an instructor, would ever be able to manage. Samantha Knight and Meaghan Ritola, the two editors-in-chief, aided by Christina Balram and Riannon Westall, two extremely strong senior story editors, all had extremely demanding internship commitments in the winter 2015 semester. At the beginning of the term, none were certain they could manage the time demanded by this project.
They started as a team of four, and then divided up the work and job titles to fit the roles that they were each taking on, and would continue to do for the duration of the term. There were moments when it really wasn’t fun, and they were overwhelmed by the amount of work–and the need for diplomacy–required of them. Yet along with Christina Gomba and Ian McDougald, the art directors from the digital communications class, they produced not just the final print magazine, but a “mini mag” version that was edited down and distributed at the Emerge conference in April. This team will be unforgettable for its accomplishments.
ACP: What does the Pacemaker mean to you and your staff?
KN: Everybody involved in EMERGE Magazine — and the rest of the interdisciplinary media production — was thrilled with this award. It was amazing for a tiny school the size of Guelph-Humber, with such a limited amount of time and money with which to produce a print publication, to be recognized in this league.
What has been particularly wonderful is that, although the student work was finished, we did not have a window at the printer until after the ACP deadline. So we took PDFs from files that came right out of the students’ hands and had them printed at a storefront printer and bound with ring binding, which was all that the little printer could offer.
We sent that in, fingers crossed that the ACP judges could see through the rough copy to the quality of the student work the lay beneath. And they did! This, to us, shows more than anything else the level of thought and real insight that goes into the ACP awards, and it makes this prize all the sweeter.
It is remarkable and gratifying to see that what our graduating media students accomplished is visible to such a prestigious organization as the ACP, even without the bells and whistles of glossy paper and perfect-binding.