TBABJ Announces Its 2008 Griot Drum Scholarship Winners

The Tampa Bay Association of Black Journalists is pleased to announce its 2008 Griot Drum Scholarship Winners.

TBABJ members chose this year's winners from its largest field of candidates yet; applicants needed only be high school or college students of color studying journalism or preparing to study journalism in college with a connection to the Tampa Bay area.

The three honorees each will receive $1,000 scholarships and one year's paid membership to both the TBABJ and the National Association of Black Journalists.

They also will be honored during our Griot Drum Awards banquet at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20 at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg. Please join us in congratulating the winners:

Jacqueline Haberman is an intern at WUSF, the public radio station at the University of South Florida, where she is a senior. She spent her summer serving as arts and entertainment editor for The Oracle, USF’s student newspaper, and also previously interned for AARP, where she helped establish a presence of the organization’s Divided We Fail campaign on university campuses across the state. In her scholarship essay, Jackie analyzed the role race played in media coverage of this year’s presidential elections. She criticized the media for labeling groups of voters by their ethnicity and assuming voters shared similar views because of their race.

Erik Maza calls Bradenton home, but this University of Florida senior has already placed international work experience on his resume. Erik recently returned from Guatamala, where he was among a dozen student writers and photographers documenting stories of hunger and malnutrition. He spent his Spring 2008 semester studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain, as part of the English degree he is completing along with his bachelor’s in journalism. His byline has appeared in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the Gainesville Sun and as he has worked as a stringer for the Associated Press. In addition to his many talents, Erik is also fluent in Spanish and speaks Italian.

A 2008 graduate of Wharton High School in Tampa, Christina Ramos is in her first semester at the University of Central Florida. While at Wharton, Christina traded lunch time with her friends to work on stories and page design for her school newspaper. Christina had a busy senior year at Wharton. She served as president of her school’s National Honor Society, chairperson for her Senior Class Council and volunteered through Key Club. She graduated with a 4.9 GPA. Terry Sollazzo, Christina’s high school newspaper adviser, said, “She sets goals for herself and is relentless in pursuing those goals. She seeks out the truth and reports it fairly. In other words, she is just what this industry needs.”