Online Signal wins 2009 Pacemaker award, highest ACP honor for online student publications

Whether academic, athletic, or personal, success remains a common theme of Ouachita and has grown to become the standard for future expectations. One publication, the online Signal, takes this success to a new level with a high caliber of exquisite work in a short amount of time through winning a 2009 Pacemaker award.
 
Mitch Bettis, former OBU professor and sponsor of the online Signal views this award as prestigious.
 
“Associated Collegiate Press is the oldest and largest national membership organization for college student journalists,” he said. “It holds an annual contest for its member universities to compete for national honors for yearbooks, student newspapers and now online news editions. ACP offers its highest honor, the Pacemaker award, to online college student publications.”
 
The requirements for a Pacemaker award vary, as well as their judging criteria.
 
“The online publication must be produced and maintained primarily by students,” Bettis said. “Awards will be based on design, ease of navigation, writing and editing, graphics and interactivity. Sites are judged by non-ACP staff members knowledgeable about design, journalism and interactive media.”
 
Dr. Jeff Root, dean of the School of Humanities builds upon the importance of the online Signal’s accomplishment.
 
“We believe it’s a very meaningful award because it’s the major award given by the ACP,” Root said. “We have traditionally attended [the ACP’s] workshops and competed in their contests. This is a major award for that organization that’s given to about eight to 10 publications regardless of size, so we’re very excited to have won it this year — it’s a major step for the online Signal.”
 
The Signal competed with 223 universities around the country who were divided into various categories: Four-Year Daily Newspaper, Four-Year Non-Daily Newspaper, Two-Year Daily Newspaper and Two-Year Daily Newspaper. Out of the 223 schools, 21 earned Pacemakers, including only 10 from the online Signal’s category. Because this was the online Signal’s first year, many were surprised of its immediate success.
 
“I was thrilled just for The Signal to be named a finalist,” Bettis said. “We were notified that we were a finalist for the award in the spring of 2009. To be a finalist in our first year of operation was a phenomenal accomplishment, and I told our Web team that each member should feel proud for that achievement. When it was announced that we won a Pacemaker at the October ACP convention, I was surprised — I certainly didn’t imagine that feat in the first year.”
 
According to Bettis, convergence inspired the mass communications department to organize the site.
 
“We launched The Signal Web site in September 2008,” Bettis said. “The trend in professional media these days is convergence — the blending of skills from various communications disciplines such as writing, photography, video into a single medium of a Web site. Our department wanted to create a real-world experience for our students so they would be prepared for the job market after college. To do this, we set out to create a Web experience that would integrate all the disciplines we have in our department already.”
 
Despite recent success, the goals and expectations for the online Signal are not out of sight.
 
“We want to continue to give all of our majors an opportunity to have their work seen,” Root said. “One of the great things about The Signal is the opportunity to have more student work visible to the public. We want to continue to enlarge and expand on what we’re doing, to get more students involved and to continue to give more frequent updates and more variety in programming.”
 
Root looks forward to a bright future for the online Signal.
 
“[The online Signal] is constantly changing,” Root said. “We update it or upgrade it every week, and then we actually do some live events from time to time starting with Tiger Tunes last year. We’ve done some basketball and we’ve done Scholars Day as well as Tiger Tunes again this fall, so it provides us the opportunity to do some exciting things. We even have students who have done some entertainment programming on the site, so there are a lot of things going on The Signal Web site. It’s multi-dimensional and it gives us a chance to try out a lot of ideas.”