Journalism isn’t a new concept for me, but actually doing the thing in real life was a little daunting at the start. I joined Mass Media at Lincoln Southwest my junior year (which, if you’re counting, was last year). Everything before that was pure exploration and piqued curiosity. Today, I’m editor-in-chief for The Hawk and somehow got nationally recognized by a (subjectively) huge theatre awards program. Allow me to rewind a bit.

In April 2025, as I was rehearsing and performing as the title character in our premiere production of Harry Potter in the Cursed Child (shameless brag), I decided to bring my camera, along with the huge battery pack my dad and I bought for it, and finally record my application video for the Jimmy Awards Student Reporter Search. It took about two days to film and I had a fairly large group of friends helping throughout to hold the camera (and the comically heavy battery).

For the uninformed, the Jimmy Awards Student Reporter Search is an initiative organized by the Jimmy Awards, or the National High School Musical Theatre Awards. This program, created by the Broadway League, invites over 100 students to New York City to compete for several awards and scholarships, including Best Performance in an Ensemble, Spirit of the Jimmy Awards, and Rising Star (best improvement), ultimately announcing the Best Actor and Best Actress awards at the end of the Tony Awards-inspired showcase in June. Along with these students, the Jimmy Awards invites two student journalists to cover the final rehearsals leading up to the showcase, and this was the event I was most interested in.

So, I edited and submitted my application video through the Nebraska Theater Academy, which is considered a “regional awards program” (RAP), and from that point on, it was just a waiting game until I heard about my results in early May. Waiting sucks, but as my father once told me, “patience is a virtue…that just takes too long.” Want to watch my video in the meantime? Check it out below:

Eventually, I got an email from Erin Coffey, Manager of Audience Engagement at the Broadway League, congratulating me for becoming one of ten national finalists in the search for their student reporters. National. Finalist. Eek.

The process after becoming a finalist is, by definition, a popularity contest. The Jimmy Awards posts all ten application videos on Instagram and Facebook, and whichever two videos (one male-presenting, one female-presenting) gets the most engagement, which includes likes, comments and shares, gets a free trip over to New York City to report on the last three days, including the final showcase the following Monday night. I got really close. About a couple hundred likes off, close. I did, however, have the most views. More on that later.

But, before I learned if I was hunkering down (or up?) in a suite on the Julliard campus for three days, the annual showcase for the Nebraska Theater Academy was coming up. Southwest’s theatre program performs in the showcase, so nothing about it was new to me as a third-year participant. But, instead of spending the last week of May in Omaha singing and dancing, I’d be wandering around the Holland Center with my camera and a purpose in life, if only for five days. I was actually pretty busy, seeing as I was hopping between filming rehearsals and taking photos of workshops, along with interviewing Maria Cade from Omaha’s Channel 6 station, all while posting updates on the Omaha Performing Arts’ Tenaska Center for Arts Engagement Instagram page. For context, they run the Nebraska Theater Academy. I got an award and everything.

By the way, this award may look like glass, but when 2023 alum Steven Dao handed it to me, I didn’t expect it to be so light. That’s because it’s not glass as it may seem at first, it’s actually acrylic. Maybe I was the only one who thought it was glass, but hey, it still has my name on it, and I still stood on stage awkwardly for three minutes as Broadway actor and host for the night, Kevyn Morrow, was talking about how I was in the lead holding it! Foreshadowing by the way.

After the showcase on Saturday, May 31, the next two days were the longest days of my life. The results for who was going to be selected as the next student reporters came out on June 2, and I quite literally could not wait any longer. Even my group chat with the marketing team at Omaha Performing Arts was getting restless. But alas, that faithful day came. And went.

Remember when I said Morrow was “foreshadowing” when he said I was in the lead? I meant that ironically. I got an email that night saying I was not selected. Shucks. Despite the upsetting news, I stayed tuned-in for the Jimmy’s later that month, mostly just to watch Nebraska nominees Myles Hardt and Natalie Kersten from Lincoln East and Millard West High Schools respectively (and my spiritual husband, Hayden Poe from Dalton, Georgia, if you read this I love you).

And of course, the moment half of you probably skipped to already: my opinion. This is an opinion piece, after all, not a memoir.

Of course, hindsight in this is pretty much 20/20. If you watched the video, you may have seen that it leaned more towards my ability to speak on camera with a pre-prepared script, rather than on-the-field reporting or interviews, omitting the “SCENARIO” interview in the middle, as that was one of the requirements. I did take a look at the video of the person who won, Jose Antonio Morales from San Antonio, Texas, and the bulk of what was included were interviews and even news clippings from his involvement in the “Joci Awards” (San Antonio’s RAP).

Not to compare at all, but there was a stark difference between every video. Some were comedic, some were informative, and some were, to be frank, kind of boring! And this is not to put anyone down or pit anyone against each other, all of these people were finalists, and that’s ten people out of a maximum of 110, so even becoming a finalist is crazy impressive. Heck, I wasn’t even sure if I would get in.

The Jimmy’s in general are an interesting subject. I could dive so much deeper into the awards themselves having been involved with the community for a hot minute, but that’s for another time! The way they handle guidelines, criteria and how they judge all of those factors is even more interesting.

On the website for the Jimmy Awards (jimmyawards.com), there is a page dedicated to the Student Reporter Search, and under the “Process of Choosing Jimmy Awards Reporters” section, there’s a blurb about how they judge the top ten videos, eventually choosing their two lucky reporters. I kid you not, my eyes hurt reading this, just take a gander. This is the full blurb:

“…The Submissions Board will review video analytics, which includes, but is not limited to: the number of unique users who saw the applicants’ page, the number of times the applicants’ page was seen as a total count, the number of impressions of the applicant’s post in a News Feed, the number of unique users who clicked anywhere in the applicant’s post, the total number of clicks in the applicant’s post, both the total count and number of unique users who have given negative feedback to the applicant’s post, both the total count and number of unique users who have liked the applicant’s Page, the number of people who clicked on the post because they liked the applicant’s post, the number of people who liked the applicant’s page and clicked on the applicant’s post, both the total count and number of unique users who watched 95% of the applicant’s video (excluding paid promotion), both the total count and unique users who watched the video for 3 seconds (excluding paid promotion), and the length of the video.”

As someone who has done content creation since he was six years old…you can’t see half of those metrics. I don’t even know how you would measure most of these. “Both the total count and number of unique users who have given negative feedback to the applicant’s post.” What does that even mean? Is that referring to comments? You can’t exactly dislike an Instagram Reel like you can on YouTube. How can you tell if a person has liked the applicant’s page, isn’t that something only the applicant could see? Nothing makes sense. Who am I? I don’t know anymore.

I’m rambling, but you get my point? Whatever, I still take a “W” because I had the most views out of everybody: about 65,000 views. For reference, Morales’ video got 16,000. I got four times the views. I’ll brag about that achievement all day.

As I begin my senior year of high school, I’m hoping to involve myself even more to the Jimmy’s, hopefully becoming a finalist in my RAP to become a performing nominee for the awards, rather than a reporter. Plus, I can finally audition this year thanks to my casting as Jimmy Ray Dobbs in Bright Star here at Southwest (which, if you haven’t listened or watched to that musical, I highly recommend it). I may not have had my way with my journalism experience, but here’s to hoping for better luck hootin’ and hollerin’ my way to the Big Apple in 2026. Cheers!