Category Archives: The Rice Thresher

The Rice Thresher Sweeps TIPA

from left: Thresher News Editor James Cancelarich, Thresher Editor-in-Chief Kathleen Ortiz, Rice Director of Student Media Chris Evans, and Rice Opinions Editor Jenna Perrone.

Saturday April 12, 2025—The Rice Thresher cleaned up at the state journalism awards at the Texas Intercollegiate Publications Association (TIPA). The event brought together hundreds of collegiate journalists from across the state. The Thresher took home nearly two dozen awards.

1st place – Andersen Pickard (sports column), Andersen Pickard (sports game story), Alice Sun (special edition design), Alice Sun (overall newspaper design), James Cancelarich (general news), Kathleen Ortiz (sports news story)
2nd place – Andersen Pickard & Jay Collura & Sam Balakrishnan & Riya Misra (headline), Ed. Board (editorial), Andersen Pickard (feature story), Kathleen Ortiz (sports game story)
3rd place – Guillian Paguila (photo illustration), Alice Sun & Riya Misra (static infographic), Alice Sun (cover design), Hong Lin Tsai (cartoon), Pavithr Goli (sports column), Juliana Lightsey (live feature writing), Kathleen Ortiz (sports feature photo)
Honorable mention – Max Scholl (critical review), Bryan Mendoza (illustration)
A big congratulations to the Rice Thresher staff! The most recent issue of the Rice Thresher can be found here.

ACP Best of Show Awards 2025

Congrats to Campanile yearbook editors Eugenia Sung and Ananya Lertpradist for placing in the Best of Show awards for their designs—as well as Rice Thresher journalists Riya Misra and Chi Pham for their reporting and Cali Liu for their photojournalism—at the recent Associated Collegiate Press national convention in Long Beach!

Annnnd congratulations to everyone for both Thresher and Campanile’s overall award in Best of Show. They put in the work, that work is being recognized, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Student Media & Arts Fair 2024

Do you enjoy writing, taking pictures, playing music, watching films, illustrating, attending concerts, going to art gallery exhibitions or otherwise getting creative in your free time?

Want to see a live ktru DJ set?

Do you just like free food and cool art?

Come to the Student Media & Arts Fair at the Moody Center for the Arts on September 7 from 6-8 p.m. and explore the many creative-minded clubs, organizations, and resources at Rice. Happening alongside the Moody Student Collaborative’s Student Reception, you can discover more about the creative side of campus at the Student Media & Arts Fair! Meet all the clubs, organizations, and resources making art happen. Don’t miss out on a chance to connect and get inspired. Participating groups include:

Whether you’re looking for a creative outlet, a public platform or like-minded Owls, the Student Media & Arts Fair is your one-stop shop for making connections and meeting new friends. This event is in conjunction with Do Ho Suh: In Process Student Opening Reception. Food will be provided.

At the students-only reception you will enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at artist Do Ho Suh’s research and collaborations including the series The Bridge Project which features the work of Rice Engineering students. You will also be able to contribute to Suh’s Artland, a sculptural landscape where you can shape your own characters from clay.

Student Media & Arts Fair 2023

Do you enjoy writing, taking pictures, playing music, watching films, illustrating, attending concerts, going to art gallery exhibitions or otherwise getting creative in your free time? Want to see a live KTRU DJ set? Do you just like free food and cool art? Come to the Student Media & Arts Fair at the Moody Center for the Arts on August 24 from 4-6 p.m. and explore the many creative-minded clubs, organizations, and resources at Rice. Participating groups include:

Whether you’re looking for a creative outlet, a public platform or like-minded Owls, the Student Media & Arts Fair on August 24 is your one-stop shop for making connections and meeting new friends. In addition to free food and cold drinks, the open house will also provide tours of the Moody Center’s makerspace — a 3D-printing lab, woodshop, metalworking studio and more, all free for Rice students to use year-round ­— alongside special access to JooYoung Choi’s exhibition at the Moody, Love and Wondervision, which closes August 26.

To RSVP scan the QR code above or click here.

Student Highlight: Channing Wang!

This is a new series started to highlight the work of exceptional students in student media. 

Channing Wang is a senior at Duncan College. He comes from Wells, Maine, and is a first generation, low-income college student. He was nominated by Kelley Lash for his exceptional work not only for the Thresher, but also for always lending a helping hand wherever needed. 

How long have you been working with Student Media? What was your experience level before coming to Rice?

“I’ve been working with Student Media since my freshman fall semester at Rice. I started as a Thresher photographer and then became Photo Editor in my sophomore year. My experience level with photography was about 1-2 years before coming to Rice. In high school, I was doing mostly landscape and outdoor photography. I had almost no experience with journalism prior to coming to Rice.”

What is your favorite thing about your role in student media?

“Being a part of Student Media and the Thresher forces me to consistently be creative and work on my photography and my craft. [I think] about how to best capture an event and choose the best photo to pair with the stories we publish. I think about the photos we took during unique times on campus like the winter freeze or COVID life on campus. Those are the photos that I believe will be invaluable well into the future when people want to look back.

I also love being in the office and working with the other writers and editors. I think we all feed well off of each other’s energy.”

Photography by Channing Wang

What has been the most rewarding thing about working with student media?

“I’ve always found the most rewarding thing about working for student media is to be able to stay up to date on a broad range of information and news around campus. I suppose this is a general by-product of working on a newspaper, but there’s so many things I would not know about if I wasn’t plugged into the paper week in and week out.

This has helped me build broader perspectives and I think ultimately made me a more diverse person. There’s a lot of things happening at any time on campus and being a part of student media has helped me break out of my little personal bubble.”

Photography by Channing Wang

Do you have any post-graduation plans? 

“I want to do more international travel and have a nice dinner with my friends.”

What is a fun fact about yourself?

“I used to travel to other states in New England to competitively solve Rubik’s cubes.”

Apply to be Thresher’s New Advertising Manager

The Thresher is looking to hire a new Advertising Manager! Apply to the role through Handshake here. Below is a description of the role and requirements:

The advertising manager is responsible for ensuring that the Thresher is financially self-sufficient by maintaining relationships with local advertisers and national advertising agencies. The advertising manager oversees the advertising insertion orders, ads production and ads layout. The advertising manager consults with the business director to determine the advertising rates and consults with the editor advertising manager in chief to determine layout policies and general advertising policies. The advertising manager is also responsible for ensuring that ad layout and ad production deadlines are met. All members of the advertising staff are generally expected to work together in developing ideas for advertising campaigns that will ensure the fiscal security of The Rice Thresher.

The advertising manager should have completed one year at Rice and should have completed one semester on a business staff. The advertising manager should demonstrate sound business judgment, high ethical standards and the ability to supervise and participate in advertising sales and layouts for newspaper. The advertising manager will be responsible for managing national advertising accounts, for recruitment of and effective management of and leadership for business assistants and sales representatives and will assist the business director and advertising representatives in the billing process.

Specifically, the advertising manager:
  • Meets established deadlines.
  • Maintains office hours daily.
  • Conducts weekly advertising meetings.
  • Supervises the activities of all advertising staffers, including recruitment and training.
  • Helps to collect all advertising revenue owed to The Rice Thresher and turns it over to the business director for deposit.
  • Schedules, coordinates and provides customer service with all national advertising agencies and accounts for both newspaper and online.
  • Prepares “dummy” (placement) of the ads and determines the size of a given edition (in consultation with the managing editor or editor in chief).
  • Prepares a written report, called a “manifest,” one week in advance of each edition, listing all ads sold and the size of each ad.
  • Distributes copies of this manifest, together with the page “dummy,” to the managing editor, the editor in chief, the business director and the director of student media.
  • Coordinates any special news requirements for special sections directly with the managing editor.
  • Maintains consistency in the advertising/news ratio for each edition. (The volume of ads sold for each edition determines the size of the edition. The newspaper’s target split is 40 percent advertising, 60 percent news.)
  • Assists in choosing contest entries for local, state and national contests.
  • Performs other duties as warranted.

Again, applications will be via Handshake: https://rice.joinhandshake.com/jobs/5213453

Please reach out to ricestudentmedia@gmail.com with any questions!

Rice Thresher wins 19 awards in state competition

The Rice Thresher won 19 awards, including first place overall excellence, in the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association‘s annual contest. Additionally, the Thresher swept the best use of social media, breaking news category.

Additionally, the Campanile yearbook won two awards.

1st place awards
Narrative Reporting — Critical Review
Queen and Slim
Taylor Crain

Narrative Reporting ­­– Editorial
Racism at Rice
Thresher editorial board

Narrative Reporting – Feature Story
Queer in the Country
Lily Wulfemeyer

Narrative Reporting – Sports Column
Biggest Upset
Andrew Grottkau

Production — Best Use of Social Media – Breaking News
ICE Costumes

Production – Sports Page/Spread Design – Newspaper
Baseball

Production – Sports Page/Spread Design – Newspaper
Baseball

Overall Excellence – Newspaper
The Rice Thresher

2nd place awards
Narrative Reporting — Breaking News
ICE Costumes

Narrative Reporting — Critical Review
Mapa Wiya
Arelia Navarro Magallon

Narrative Reporting – Feature Story
Bored Ike
Ella Feldman

Narrative Reporting – General Column
Dropping out
Eric Stone

Narrative Reporting – In-Depth Reporting
In their own words
Christina Tan, Anna Ta

Production — Best Use of Social Media – Breaking News
Protest

3rd place awards

Narrative Reporting — Breaking News
Violations in voting
Christina Tan

Production — Best Use of Social Media – Breaking News
Willy’s Pub

Production — Overall Design – Web

Campanile, Thresher win 16 national awards

Eric Stone | The Rice Thresher

 Rice Campanile and the Rice Thresher won a combined 16 awards at the joint Associated College Press/College Media Association convention in Louisville, Kentucky last weekend.

The CMA’s Pinnacle Awards, along with the ACP’s Pacemakers and Individual Awards, recognize the nation’s best in college student media for the 2017-18 academic year.

Campanile won a first-place Pinnacle from the CMA for Best Yearbook Entertainment Spread. It placed second in the overall category, Yearbook of the Year. It also received honorable mentions for Best Yearbook Cover and Best Divider. Joanna Yang and Kira Chen were editors-in-chief for the 2017-18 Campanile, entitled “Outside the Lines,” and current Campanile Editor-in-Chief Charis Wang accepted the awards.

“Winning the awards was honestly very humbling,” Wang said in a written statement. “There were so many outstanding books, and it made me realize how much work, time, and collaboration it takes to create something that even closely resembles a yearbook.”

The Thresher was a finalist for the ACP’s Newspaper Pacemaker award, which recognizes the best student newspapers in the nation. This is the second straight year the Thresher has been a finalist and the fourth time overall. The 37 Pacemaker finalists represented the top seven percent of newspapers which entered the competition, according to the ACP.

The Thresher and its staff came in first in three Pinnacle categories, including Best Newspaper Sports Spread, Best Podcast and Best Newspaper Nameplate. Other Thresher Pinnacles included a second place for Best Advertisement and honorable mentions for Best Sports News Photo, Best Photo Package, Best Sports Section and Best Social Media Main Page.

Both the ACP and CMA recognized then-Thresher Sports Editor and current co-Editor-in-Chief Andrew Grottkau for his long form piece, Immortality: An Oral History of the 2003 Rice Baseball Team. The piece garnered a second-place ACP Individual Award for Best Sports Multimedia Story and a third-place Pinnacle in the same category. The Pinnacles also recognized Grottkau with an honorable mention for Best Sports Columnist.

These awards follow the Princeton Review’s recognition of the Thresher as the third-best college paper in the nation.

Rice Thresher ranked #12 in Princeton Review rankings

For the first time in known history, The Rice Thresher was ranked in the Princeton Review rankings. The student-run newspaper came in 12th in the nation in the survey.

By B.J. Almond

Rice also ranked No. 1 for quality of life, lots of race/class interaction and No. 2 for happiest students.

The best quality of campus life is at Rice University, according to student surveys used for the Princeton Review’s 2018 edition of “The Best 382 Colleges.”

Princeton Review tallied the rankings from surveys of 137,000 students attending the 382 best colleges in the book in 2016-17 and/or the previous two academic years. The surveys included 84 questions about academics, administration, the student body and the students themselves. The college guide published the top 20 schools in each category. Along with three rankings in the top 10, Rice was cited in six other categories in the top 20:

12 for best college newspaper.
14 for best health services.
15 for best-run colleges.
16 for most beautiful campus.
16 for best college dorms.
20 for best campus food.

The profile in the college guide notes that Rice “manages to foster ‘great research’ along with an ‘unbeatable sense of community’ and attributes much of that to the residential college system. The guide states that Rice provides students with a variety of “experiential learning opportunities such as internships and civic engagement” and that Rice undergrads “work extremely hard” but manage to balance schoolwork with clubs, organizations and social events. Students enjoy exploring Houston’s restaurants, art museums, theater, ballet and opera as well as playing sports for their residential colleges and attending fun events on campus. The guide also notes that students “value that many of their peers come from ‘diverse backgrounds,’” which “leads to an ongoing exchange of new perspectives and opinions.” According to the guide, what Rice undergrads love most is that they have classmates who are “caring.”

Last year the Princeton Review ranked Rice No. 1 for happiest students and for lots of race/class interaction and No. 9 for best quality of life.

For more information on the rankings, visit www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings/best-colleges.

Thresher and Campanile celebrate 100 years with awards

The Rice Thresher and Campanile celebrated their 100th years by garnering numerous first place awards on the national and state level.

The Thresher placed first place in College Media Association’s Apple Awards presented at the Spring National College Media Convention in March. The editor in chief was Andrew Ta. Additionally, The Thresher won the overall excellence award at the Texas Intercollegiate Press Awards presented in early April. The student-run newspaper received a total of 20 awards in the annual contest.

For the fourth year in a row, the Campanile won the sweepstakes award for yearbook in the Texas Intercollegiate Press Awards presented in early April. The award was granted based on total points earned in the other categories of the annual contest.

In addition to the sweepstakes award, Campanile won first place Overall Excellence and nine other first place categories alone. The yearbook won 20 awards in the contest this year.

The 2015 book was the 100th edition of the Campanile, and featured a padded cover, gilded edges and a placeholder ribbon. Additionally, every copy came in a clamshell box. The theme was Confessions and the editor in chief was Anastasia Bolshakov. Additionally the 2015 Campanile placed eighth in the Associated Collegiate Press’s Best of Show awarded at the Fall National College Media Convention.

Thresher TIPA Awards

In-Depth Reporting
2nd place: Yasna Haghdoost
Critical Review
2nd place: Canon Lewis
Feature Page Design
First place: Samantha Ding
Sports Page Design
Third place: Sarah Nyquist
Feature Story
Third place: Lenna Mendoza
Feature Photo
Third place: Vidya Ghiri
Illustration
First place: Staff
Information Graphic
2nd place: Justin Park
General Column
2nd place: Bridget Schilling
News Feature Story
First place: Elena Margosis
Special Edition/Section
2nd place: Staff
Editorial
Third place: Staff
News Photo
Honorable Mention: Anastasia Bolshakov
Sports Column
First place: Jeremy Reiskind
Honorable Mention: Evan Neustater
Sports Action Photo
2nd place: Sean Chu
Page One Design
Third place: Justin Park
Headline
Two Honorable Mentions: Staff
Overall Excellence
First place: The Rice Thresher

Campanile TIPA Awards

Academic Photo

Third place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Academics

First place: Staff

Cover Design

First place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Endsheets

2nd place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Feature Photo

2nd place: Rahul Kothari

Sports Action Photo

First place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Sports Feature Photo

First place: Janet Ni

Opening

First place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Academics Copy

First place: Staff

Feature/Student Life

First place: Anastasia Bolshakov
2nd place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Organizations Copy

First place: Staff

People Spread w/Mugshots

2nd place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Photo Story

Third place: Anastasia Bolshakov

Sports

First place: Zoe Wu

Sports Copy

First place: Zoe Wu
2nd place: Zoe Wu

Student Life Copy

First place: Staff
2nd place: Staff

Overall Excellence

First place: Staff
 

Rice University Student Media