Macleay College’s journalism program has received two of the highest honours at the annual Ossie Awards – announced overnight in Hobart.
Hatch was named “Best Publication” while Sinead Fogarty won The Australian Press Council Prize for “Journalism Student of the Year”.
Sinead also won “Best Video Story by an Undergraduate or Postgraduate Student” for her exceptional piece: The Australian Women rising from Mother’s Ruin.
The Ossie Awards are organised by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) and are named after the journalist, Osmar S. White.
They recognise outstanding achievement by students in more than two dozen university journalism schools in Australia and New Zealand. Senior journalists and editors judge the main award categories.
In awarding Hatch “Best Publication”, the judges commented:
Macleay College’s entry Hatch stands out from a high quality field with its engaging format, topic selection and well written stories. The inclusion of a news ticker and slider on the home page gives the publication a dynamic news feel and Facebook and Twitter feeds help provide up-to-the-minute reports.
Sinead’s video story was described as “beautifully shot and edited”. The judges made particular mention of it being a reporter-less piece: “arguably the most difficult of TV broadcast stories to do”.
Her profile of the Australian women behind “Mother’s Ruin” was just one of the many well researched and well-written multimedia stories that led to Sinead being named “Journalism Student of the Year.”
Sinead Fogarty demonstrated a superior ability to connect with and get the most out of interviewees and capture the essence of what is of interest to the reader. Sinead has a mature and lively writing style, has embraced new media and developed a compendium of consistently high quality work. Her work includes book reviews for the 2017 Hatch-Stella Prize and an article in which she accurately predicts the winner. Sinead achieved the highest academic marks for her year.
You can find more of Sinead’s work, and stories by all of Macleay College’s journalism students, on Hatch – or on Facebook , Instagram and Twitter.
The full list of Ossie Award recipients can be found on the JERAA website. Congratulations to all winners – and their lecturers.