J-School alum honored with Scripps Howard Award

Jou, who studied new media at the J-School and is now a multimedia editor at the Wall Street Journal, produced videos for the award-winning project. The story covers a former Hong Kong enclave that was once the densest urban area in the world. To mark the 20th anniversary of its demolition, Jou and her colleagues created a visually rich interactive experience to enable viewers to visit the now-demolished city through the eyes of its former inhabitants.

Jou says the interdisciplinary education she got at the J-School helped her learn how to push the boundaries of new media. “The instructors and course work deepened my understanding of coding, taught me how to be a one-woman band video producer and sharpened my skills as a reporter,” she said.

“The Kowloon Walled City project required a solid foundation of reporting and video production and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the skills I learned and developed at North Gate.”

The Scripps Howard judges were impressed with the immersive multimedia experience Jou and her collaborators created.

“The judges were struck by how multiple digital techniques were combined to provide readers with a pick-your-own-adventure journey through this crammed enclave, tucked into Hong Kong, where roughly 40,000 people lived literally on top of each other,” they wrote. “The result was an immersive, fully interactive experience that relied on video and graphics – not text – that produced a story that was informative and emotionally engaging.”

Scripps Howard also named Lily Mihalik (’11), another J-School alum, a finalist in the Digital Innovation category for co-producing Build Your Own California, an interactive website for the Los Angeles Times that enabled users to divide California into multiple states. The concept grew out of a recent proposal to break the Golden State into six separate states that would be easier to govern. Mihalik’s interactive gave users the ability to carve up the state into as many as 15 states.