North Central College among the top broadcasting award winners

North Central College was among the top winners of the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS) annual awards announced March 8 at the 75th International IBS Conference in New York City.

WONC student broadcasters won four first-place awards and 13 finalist trophies. The first-place awards went to Jason Krug ’14 who won two top trophies for Best Sports Update and for Best Social Media Director, Yasmeen Kiswani ’14 for Best Documentary and Kevin Jackman ’14 for Best Podcast.

The finalist trophies are presented to students who placed in the top five in the nation; no second- or third-place awards are named.

“I was delighted to see so many of our students honored at this year’s event,” said John Madormo, assistant professor of broadcast communication and general manager of WONC-FM 89.1. “We have an extremely talented group of seniors this year. And come June, I will dearly miss them.”

North Central’s finalist winners by category included Jackman for Best Newscast; Jackman and Bobby Mette ’14 for Best Play-by-Play; Kristin Gitchell ’14, Kelsey King ’14 and Adam Halick ’15 for Best Promo; Jeremy Rushing ’14 for Best Liner/ID/Sweeper; Gitchell and King for Best Talk Program; Gitchell and King for Best Specialty Show; Jared Shlensky ’14 for Best Podcast; Krug, Alex Palac ’15 and Halick for Best Podcast; Rushing for Best Station Blog; Gitchell for Best News Director; King for Best Production Director; Jackman for Best Station Manager; and WONC-FM for Best College/University Station (enrollments under 10,000).

“Those receiving finalist awards are just as deserving as those who received first-place awards,” said Madormo. “What sometimes is lost when someone doesn’t walk away with a first-place trophy is the fact that the finalist is one of the top five candidates in the country—it doesn’t get much better than that!”

The top IBS award recipients this year are Krug with two first-place and one finalist awards, Jackman with one first-place and three finalist awards, Gitchell and King with four finalist awards, and Rushing and Halick with two finalist awards.

Click here to view the list of all IBS award winners.

WONC is among the most honored collegiate radio stations in America and has won national and state awards in commercial and collegiate competitions. The station has won 20 Marconi College Radio Awards; no other college or university radio station in the country has won more. With a 30-mile listening radius and potential listening audience of four million people, WONC’s pure rock music format broadcasts a mix of news, sports, traffic, music and public affairs programming 24 hours a day, year-round. Listen live at wonc.org.