The Online News Association honors outstanding journalism annual with their prestigious awards. They also manage to reach the smaller outlets as well as the mainstream news. To that end, I decided to feature four pieces of journalism put together by students that either won or were nominated for ONA awards in 2011.
The first piece I chose to read was a multimedia website from Northwestern called Global Warning. The site completely analyzes the issues posed by global warming, both to the environment and national security. Not only did it define the factors leading to massive climate change, but it openly criticized the governments' inaction towards the major issue. The students that put this together deserve a lot of credit, and got it through the Multimedia Feature Presentation, Student award from the ONA.
Three other stories were nominated for the same award, and one of them was Vwa Fanm, a project put together by students at the University of Miami. The name of the site means "women's voices" in Creole, and the site shares the stories of twelve displaced Haitian migrant women living in the Dominican Republic. Each woman put together a story and then a student did a companion story on each woman. The website was professional, comprehensive, and contained great subject matter.
Also nominated was another Miami production, Haiti's Lost Children. This site dealt with the educational crisis taking place in the aftermath of horrific earthquake that rocked the small island nation a couple of years ago. Most of the multimedia was a series of short videos dealing with how the country is rebuilding. The site also had a gallery of pictures and an informational write-up about the cause it was promoting. In a way, this was advocacy journalism, much like the two before it.
The final nomination went to Now What, Argentina, a project put together by the University of North Carolina. This website, which deals with the ongoing economic recovery in Argentina dating back to their 2001 economic collapse, opens like a collage, if collages all had interactive links to videos about different struggles in the country. Instead of cluttering the site with a bunch of tabs, all the information is available on the front page. This website was my favorite because the layout was awesome.
Overall, the quality of the student journalism that these four websites showed was impeccable, and the
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