UWire names 100 top student journalists

UWIRE, a wire service and career networking site for college journalists, has announced the UWIRE 100, a list of the top 100 student journalists in the country.

The students were selected from 500 nominations submitted by editors, professors, advisers and colleagues from 132 schools.

"We created the UWIRE 100 because we knew we would never be able to just name, say, the top 20, or crown a single student 'the journalist of the year," Ben French, UWIRE general manager, said in a statement. "Each of these candidates boasts an honor-worthy resume and portfolio, as well as the esteem of colleagues and advisers."

For each student you can view a profile page that includes a photo, quotes from recommendation letters and samples of their work. Here are some examples:

• Sean Blanda, Temple University
  
• Andrew Mangino, Yale University
  
• Jackie Alexander, University of South Carolina
  
• Scott Bell, University of Michigan
  

The UWIRE 100 students come from 66 different schools, ranging from small liberal arts colleges such as Cabrini, Loras and Hamilton to large state universities, according to a FAQ page about the process.

Among the schools represented by multiple students are the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (five), Penn State University (four), the University of Iowa (four), the University of Florida (three), Syracuse University (three), Indiana University (three) and the University of Texas-Austin (three). Fifty-nine of the students were graduating seniors and three were freshmen.

Check out UWIRE's campus safety project

UWIRE, a membership organization for college media that aggregates and distributes student-generated content, has put together an impressive package on campus safety around the country to mark the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre.

The package, entitled "State of Alert: Campus Safety in the aftermath of Virginia Tech," includes stories, columns and video from The Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech, the Northern Star at Northern Illinois University (where a former student killed five students and wounded 16 before killing himself on Valentine's Day), and more than a dozen other student newspapers.

State of Alert demonstrates how powerful student media organizations can be when they work together. The package is far more comprehensive than anything a single student news organization could put together because it shows the repercussions the Virginia Tech shootings, in which 32 students and the shooter died, had around the country. The package touches on campus mental health services, security upgrades, gun control legislation, the effectiveness of lockdowns and other issues raised by the deadliest campus shooting spree in American history.

UWIRE, which is in the first phase of a relaunch, gathers, edits, and re-distributes student-created content culled from more than 800 student-run media outlets, according to the Web site's About page.

"The new UWIRE.com is dedicated to collaborative journalism, created by and for media’s next generation of talent – whom we affectionately call “The Content Generation," the page says. "Our goal is to capture the collective intelligence of these aspiring media professionals and offer visitors a place to discover refined, quality user-generated content."