Carveth won Best Coverage of Diversity and Best Multimedia Feature Story at College Media Association (CMA) Pinnacle Awards
University of Guelph-Humber Media & Communication Studies alum Kate Carveth (class of 2024) was lounging in her sweatpants when she decided to check the 2024 winners list of the College Media Association (CMA) Pinnacle Awards – a contest that some of her fourth-year projects were submitted to. After scrolling through hundreds of pages of winners online, she was “ecstatic” and “shocked” to see that she had won two first-place awards!
Carveth’s Emerge projects placed first in their respective categories: The Creation of Story: Decolonizing Journalism won Best Coverage of Diversity, and Into the Shadows: Welcome to the World of Unwanted Pets won Best Multimedia Feature Story. The competition included primarily American post-secondary schools, including University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, and Pepperdine University.
“I’m really, really proud of the work that I did for these stories because I feel that they are needed within the world of journalism, within the general public,” Carveth said, adding these were both advocacy projects intended to educate the public on topics that aren’t necessarily well known. “I worked really hard because I was so passionate about them.”
The Creation of Story: Decolonizing Journalism is a long-form written feature she completed in April 2024. Carveth said her goal with this piece was to explore how colonial bias could be removed from news and storytelling. She also covered the importance of “Indigenizing journalism,” which entails including Indigenous perspectives in stories, and understanding that Indigenous and diverse communities are not a monolith.
“It's important to include diverse voices within that diversity. So not just saying, ‘This is the Indigenous community’; it's Indigenous communities,” she explained.
As for Into the Shadows: Welcome to the World of Unwanted Pets, Carveth said this project is about “undersocialized cats” (feral cats) in the Greater Toronto Area that live outdoors and are sustained by “feral cat colony caregivers.” Her piece followed some of those caregivers, including their efforts and challenges when tending to the cats. She told the story through original videos, photographs, infographics, and the written word. The final piece is a compilation of small stories pieced together to tell a greater narrative. This was completed in December 2023.
Creating the multimedia story gave Carveth valuable skill-building experiences through constructing graphics, using online content management system WordPress to publish the piece, and practicing taking photos and videos of tricky subjects – the cats, which were often tough to approach.
“I’m so glad that [these projects] got this recognition so more people can interact with the topics and learn about them,” Carveth said.
Other Emerge projects from U of GH that won a CMA Pinnacle Award were: Emerge 2024 Paws ‘N’ Hearts Team won first place for Best Overall Campus Media Engagement; Finding the Eastern Wolves Emerge 2024 Documentary Team won first place for Best Video Entertainment Program; and Emerge 2024 Ian Anderson House Team won second place for Best Multi-Media Ad Campaign.
