Board selects Student Media leaders for summer, next year
Five students have been selected by the Board of Student Publications and Communications as Student Media leaders for the summer and for the coming school year.
Sydney Patterson, a third-year broadcast journalism student, will serve as The Daily Gamecock’s Fall 2013 editor-in-chief, and Amanda Coyne, a second-year political science student, will serve as the paper’s top editor this summer.
Paul Critzman III, a third-year broadcast journalism student, will be the SGTV station manager for Summer and Fall 2013.
Kate Appelbaum, a second-year public relations student, a will manage the WUSC-FM radio station, and Annie Drowne, a third-year visual communications student, will be the Garnet & Black magazine editor-in-chief for the coming academic year.
Student Media leaders are selected by a panel of student and faculty members of the Board of Student Publications and Communications, which oversees the university’s four student-run media outlets.
Being a leader at The Daily Gamecock is a familiar role for Patterson, the paper’s current managing editor.
Since joining the publication the first week of her freshman year as a copy editor and contributor to the Mix and Viewpoints sections, Patterson has served variously as the summer Mix editor, assistant Mix editor, assistant webmaster, assistant copy desk chief, copy desk chief and summer editor-in-chief.
“When you spend as much time up here in the newsroom and working for the paper as I have, it makes you want to do as much as you can to lead the paper,” Patterson said. “We do a lot and win a lot of awards, and we’re a great paper. And I’m really excited to help the paper improve. We’ve seen nothing but improvement since I’ve been here.”
Patterson has not yet named a managing editor and said that unlike past editors, she will have an application for the paper’s second-in-command position.
Patterson said her goals for the fall semester include strengthening the staff’s recruitment and training efforts, continuing to develop the paper’s digital media presence and encouraging collaboration among Student Media platforms.
“If we team up, there’s a good chance that we can make all of our coverage much better,” Patterson said.
Critzman has already had a significant hand in such collaboration. He has helped facilitate multimedia news coverage as the news director at both SGTV and WUSC and as the multimedia director for The Daily Gamecock.
Critzman said it’s important for Student Media operations to work together and teach and learn from one another.
His goals for the coming summer and fall are to hammer down a more consistent programming schedule at SGTV and bring more focus to live content at the station.
At WUSC, Appelbaum says her goal is to build community relations within both the university and the city.
“If we all feel a sense of community and pride for our station, that will more easily radiate beyond our organization, and make USC and Columbia take a larger stake in us,” said Appelbaum, the station’s current public affairs director.
Over the summer, Coyne, who’s currently an assistant news editor at The Daily Gamecock, said she wants to capitalize on the flexibility of the newspaper’s once-a-week summer schedule by reaching for more long-form feature coverage and looking beyond the scope university news.
“I want to start our expansion of city coverage for the fall, especially city government, because we don’t do much of it, and we should,” Coyne said. “But we will also keep up with thorough coverage of USC. Just because all the students are gone doesn’t mean we’re not paying attention.”
Drowne said she wants to make Garnet & Black an “accessible and desirable” publication for all students at USC.
“Whether it’s a sorority girl who likes to read Cosmo or a computer science student who likes to read Wired, everyone at Carolina has a place, and they should also have a place in our magazine,” Drowne said.