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Electronic Journalism Arts Program Ranked in Top 25

Third Consecutive Year LSC Makes the List

Electronic Journalism Arts Program Ranked in Top 25

Third Consecutive Year LSC Makes the List

March 10, 2016

Lyndon State’s Electronic Journalism Arts Program has been ranked by industry professionals and alums as one of the top 25 journalism education programs in the United States. This is the third year in a row Lyndon has received this distinction, with top ten rankings in the past two years.

The 2015 survey by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) and Crain’s TVNewsPro magazine puts Lyndon’s program in the same caliber as Kent State, Penn State, and Boston University. Lyndon State remains the smallest and one of the most affordable schools on the list. The 107-year old program at the University of Missouri at Columbia, the first journalism school in America, once again leads the list while the graduate schools at Northwestern and Columbia follow in the second and third slots.

The RTDNA told members this year “the survey asks respondents to name the journalism schools it considers the best. The survey itself is not scientific. It’s meant to be a poll, to gauge current interest and popularity of J-schools around the country, in the same way a sports magazine might ask who your favorite baseball player or football coach is this season. And like those kinds of surveys, the same schools tend to rise to the top each year.”

“The Lyndon Electronic Journalism Arts Department is extremely proud to be named for the third year in a row as it speaks to the 40-year old program’s reputation of training journalists who can research and tell stories no matter what the medium – online, broadcast, or print,” said department co-chair Tim Lewis. He also credits the program’s success to the experiential capstone, the Vermont Center for Community Journalism, which is made up of three platforms. Students spend their final four semesters reporting daily on the fourteen towns around campus on the NewsLINC website and social media channels, the News7 newscasts, and the NewsINK e-magazine.

Lyndon students have participated in internships with all the stations in the Boston, Providence, and Portland markets as well as cable news operations run by Time-Warner, NESN, NECN, and News 12 where some now work as alumni. The experiential nature of the program is unmatched in all of New England and perhaps the U.S.

The Lyndon State College Electronic Journalism Arts Program is one of only 35 schools in the nation to have students facing a daily deadline as part of their academic studies. Lyndon is also believed to be the only school that allows community members and viewers to officially rate student performance.

The 2015 survey was originally scheduled to be conducted over a three-week period in late October and early November, but when over a thousand responses came in during the first 48 hours the poll was closed early. The RTDNA says this year’s results come with an asterisk, because the poll wasn’t kept open as long as planned.