Students from Wartburg College’s Department of Journalism & Communication were recognized at an awards banquet during the 2026 Midwest Journalism Conference on April 11 in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Wartburg student-run media won three of the 2026 Eric Sevareid Awards presented by the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association at the banquet:
- KWAR, the student-run radio station, was recognized with an Award of Merit in the Student Market Radio category for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day interview. Joziphene Luneckas-Broomhall conducted the interview and produced the segment that aired Feb. 12, 2025.
- Knight Vision, the college’s student-run television station, was recognized with an Award of Merit in the Student Market Television category for Caleb Kammerer and Christopher Guerrero’s live play-by-play coverage of a Wartburg football game against Monmouth College on Oct. 4, 2025.
- Knight Vision also was recognized with an Award of Merit in the Student Market Television category for the documentary “The Uncharted Battle: Life With Mitochondrial Disease,” which was produced by Addie Nabholz, Zach Hiney, Reagan Brooks, Liviah Johnson and Gavin Lund. The documentary premiered during the college’s annual RICE Day celebration in 2025.
Kammerer, Ali Parkhurst and Karma Goodson attended the conference with Will Buss, assistant professor, and Ron Johnson, executive in residence.
Buss also presented with Jessica Fargen Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Buss discussed the increasing challenges of news deserts, or those regions where local reporting is no longer available due to newspapers that have been forced to close. The research showed how this erosion of local reporting has struck more rural regions, how it impacts civic life and the current efforts to restart and re-establish local news in these areas.
The 2026 Midwest Journalism Conference featured college students, college student media faculty advisers and media professionals throughout Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska.
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