Haylie Berkland
Contributing Writer
On Friday, March 6, six North Central College radio students will fly to New York City to attend the 75th annual Intercollegiate Broadcasting System Conference. The North Central radio station, WONC 89.1 FM, has been nominated for 13 awards (with 14 nominations total) at this conference, including Best College Station under 10,000 students.
The six students who will be attending this conference and award ceremony along with John Madormo, professor of Broadcast Communications and General Manager of the station, are Russell Tanzillo, Wesley Rasmussen-Wilson, Samuel Reiman, Max Kachinske, Hannah Jurik, and Cora Georgiou, all of whom are nominated for awards.
After a month of gathering material to be submitted, the station produced about 90 entries to send to the IBS committee for review. From these submissions, Tanzillo explains that WONC’s 14 nominations puts them within the top three most-nominated schools.
“It’s a huge accomplishment,” says Rasmussen-Wilson, Director of News and Community Ascertainment at WONC. Rasmussen-Wilson, who has been nominated for Best News Director and Best Music Specialty Show, explains that these nominations are “a level of validation that’s really nice to have.”
Tanzillo, who is nominated for Best On-Air Personality and Best Station Promo, explains how important these awards are to him, saying that when he started as Station Manager at the beginning of this year, one of his main points of emphasis was awards.
Following this notion, Madormo also sees a lot of relevance and validation in these awards as the General Manager of the station. “I’m very big on competitions,” explains Madormo, who was nominated by members of the WONC staff for Outstanding Faculty Advisor. “If you walk into our lobby and look at the trophy case that’s filled to the brim, you’ll know that we do this a lot, and I’ve always believed that it’s helpful for the students.”
As a benefit of these awards, Tanzillos says that, “It’s something you can put on your resume when you apply for jobs that’s looked really highly at.”
With this, WONC certainly takes great pride in their program and the seriousness with which all of the staff handles their job. “A lot of colleges sort of treat their radio stations as a throw-away, extracurricular kind of thing,” Rasmussen-Wilson explains. “We take ours very seriously.”
“It really does push us ahead of the pack in the Chicagoland area,” Tanzillo says, explaining that WONC offers its students many opportunities that other college stations don’t. “I think we’re one of the more longer-standing radio stations with prestige.” Madormo furthers this confidence in WONC by stating that, “We like to think that we have one of the strongest radio programs in the country.”
To see how WONC stacks up against the rest of the country, tune back in on Saturday, March 7.
