The Midwest Journalism Conference was held April 12-13 in Bloomington, Minnesota, and WRST-FM at the University of Wisconsin came away with journalism honors in two regional competitions.

At the event, the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association presented its awards for its six-state competition. Their awards are named for and honor Eric Sevaried, the longtime CBS News reporter and commentator. WRST student reporter Joe Schulz won three awards for his long-form look at crime statistics at UW Oshkosh. He took first place in the investigative and broadcast writing categories and an award of merit for general reporting.

WRST also won awards for its regular student-produced live newscasts. WRST development/fundraising representative Rachel Ryan took first place for the 3 p.m. newscast from May 2, 2018, and former assistant news director Emma Revai got an Award of Merit for the 5 p.m. newscast from Oct. 13, 2018.

Revai also received First Place honors in the talk/public affairs category for “The Motherhood Affidavits,” a long-form interview piece she produced, which profiled a UWO professor. The segment was produced for the Advanced Radio Production class.

WRST also took first place in the sportscast-sports program category for the Dec. 3, 2018, episode of WRST’s regular sports talk show “The Sports Page.” This effort had hosts Nick Bode and Hunter Magdanz discussing that day’s big sports news: the firing of Green Bay Packers’ coach Mike McCarthy.

With these honors, WRST has now won 70 Sevaried Awards.

The event also included the awards in the four-state regional competition of the Society of Professional Journalists, called the “Mark of Excellence” awards. Joe Schulz’s crime statistics piece mentioned earlier was a finalist in the category for Radio In-Depth Reporting.

In the professional competitions, UWO Director of Radio Services Randall Davidson won honors for a long-form radio feature he produced on scam callers pretending to be from the Internal Revenue Service. It took first place honors from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association for broadcast writing and hard feature and an Award of Merit for general reporting. He produced the segment, in part, as a demonstration in his Advanced Radio Production class.