Tag Archives: director of student media

Student Media, 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.
Student Media

Introducing: Chris Evans

 

With more than 20 years of experience in journalism education and student media advising, Chris serves as director of Rice University Student Media, home of The Rice Thresher newspaper, the low-power (and intentionally lowercased) ktru-FM and The Campanile yearbook.

Before coming to Rice, Chris taught journalism and all its related things as a tenure-track assistant professor of journalism at Howard University, the nation’s premier Historically Black University, in Washington, D.C.

Chris’ courses have included multimedia storytelling, audio production, journalism research methods, and news writing. He also served as editorial director of the student-powered Howard University News Service, an award-winning online outlet that covers news for and about the African-American community, and created the Illinois Student Newsroom, which successfully trained student audio journalists to produce work for the local NPR affiliate, Illinois Public Media.

He earned his Ph.D. in English in 2023. It was a creative dissertation, which means a novel, which means he’s at the moment you read this supposed to be revising his chapters so he can send it out to agents. He’s not actually doing that, but he knows he should be.