Simone Werner, a Severna Park High School graduate, on Wednesday was nominated for a newscast award from the same organization that puts on the Emmys.
The College Television Awards are put together by the Television Academy Foundation, the “charitable arm of the Television Academy” — which hosts the annual Emmy Awards show in Los Angeles. The organization’s collegiate awards circuit was created in 1979 to recognize “excellence in student production,” according to its website.
Werner, 23, and 11 of her peers at NewsVision, which airs on the University of Miami’s UMTV, were nominated for their coverage of the terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The half-hour newscast reported on the attack and included reaction from South Florida where people on both sides of the conflict held protests and vigils.
“We talked to students that were on campus that went to the different protests. We spoke to the rabbis that worked … on campus that came together for a vigil. It was a lot of student reactions, and then also reactions to the local area as well. … So, it was really the South Florida reaction to what occurred,” Werner, a senior, said. “In news, you want to make everything local and have that local appeal, so that it makes it relevant to the people that are in the area, and there were students on campus that had best friends that were killed, that had family that was killed.”
Werner’s work was behind the camera as one of the program’s producers and writers. Her job is to write the scripts for the news anchors and produce stories for broadcast, among other things.
Since then, the school has continued its coverage of the conflict, she said.
“It is hard to put into words how excited and honored I am to have been a part of a team that was nominated for a College Television Award,” Werner said in a statement. “I put at least 20 hours of work into UMTV each week, and this nomination makes those crazy hours so incredibly worth it. If we win, it would validate our hard work.”
Winners will be announced April 5 at the Television Academy in North Hollywood, California.
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