Best of CASE District V Award
 

Institution: Kent State University

Title of entry: Birth of an Advocate

About this entry: When we decided to switch our magazine to a strictly online format, we knew we needed a great first cover story that could incorporate multimedia. Our primary audience for the magazine is alumni and donors, but it also sends to the entire campus community. This particular profile was aimed to show the prestige of Kent State alumni, and someone who was leading in their field. Willard Jenkins is the Director of the D.C. Jazz Festival and a well-renowned jazz advocate and critic; he graduated from Kent State in the early 1970s and was on campus during a significant time in Kent State history and participated in the early founding of Black United Students, which is still prevalent today. We interviewed Willard in D.C. at the Kennedy Center, where he was going to be honored, and filmed him touring through a jazz exhibit there. I wrote it based on that interview, but then we decided we also wanted additional multimedia, so we asked him for a playlist of jazz songs he thought everyone should know and we incorporated that throughout the story, as a way of breaking up the text, through a Spotify playlist. The story follows his career from KSU until today. The story was well-received, the inaugural magazine had record-breaking page views for us, and this particular story had a 70% engagement rate, with almost 2 minutes of engagement time per user.