Taylor Pomasl, a May UW-Eau Claire graduate, has been named the Society of Professional Journalists’ outstanding national journalism graduate for 2019.
Pomasl, who served as president of the campus SPJ chapter this past year, joins four other UW-EC journalism graduates who have won the prestigious Julie Galvan Award in the last 11 years. She will receive the award at SPJ’s national convention Sept. 5-7 in San Antonio, TX.
She is now a news and digital content producer at WMTV (NBC15) in Madison. Pomasl started there in her final months as an undergraduate, commuting from Eau Claire to Madison to work as a weekend producer.
The announcement from SPJ cited Pomasl’s leadership as station manager for student programming presented on radio station WUEC. In that position, she increased spoken-word programming by one-third, developed a budget proposal that significantly increased funding from student segregated fees and oversaw fund-raising efforts.
SPJ noted that the fall 2018 programming produced under her leadership received a record number of awards from the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association (WBA) and the Midwest Broadcast Journalism Association (MBJA).
Earlier, Pomasl wrote, edited and anchored newscasts on WUEC’s “Blugold Radio Sunday” program that was named by the WBA as best in the state among student broadcasters in 2017. A news story she produced on illegal immigrants won a top award from the MBJA in a category designed for entries from professional journalists rather than students.
Pomasl was the recipient of the Communication and Journalism Department’s Henry Lippold Fellowship, which carries with it a three-week residency in the newsroom at KSTP-TV in Minneapolis. She also completed internships at stations in Eau Claire, Rhinelander, Madison and St. Paul and was active on campus outside of her SPJ involvement.
SPJ’s announcement noted that Pomasl planned the student chapter’s programming. It added that she came up with the idea of starting most meetings by discussing a topic of interest to entry-level journalists, which made meetings more relevant for members.
She also took the lead in planning and coordinating the chapter’s annual fall First Amendment Free Food Festival, which offers students free pizza if they will temporarily give up their First Amendment rights. This provides an opportunity for students to find out what living in an authoritarian society might be like.
The Julie Galvan Award honors a graduating journalism student selected on the basis of character, service to the community, scholarship, proficiency in practical journalism and significant contributions to their SPJ chapter. It is named in memory of a former president of the SPJ chapter at San Jose State University, who was killed in an auto accident while on her way to an internship in 1996.
Previous UW-EC winners of this award were Megan Peterson in 2009, Jenny Unbi You in 2010, Breann Schossow in 2012 and Rachel Minske in 2014.