The annual Hellinger Awards Ceremony honors the Jandoli School's top graduates and recognizes the accomplishments of outstanding alumni.
The 2022 Hellinger Awards ceremony honored Hellinger Award winner Meghan Hall and runner-up Sarah Mahali Orcell, both 2022 graduates of the Jandoli School.
Hall, who graduated with degrees in journalism and marketing, is an editorial assistant and researcher for Boston-based InnoLead, a media and events company. Orcel, a strategic communication graduate, is a social media assistant at Crowley Webb and Associates, a full-service communications agency in Buffalo, New York.
Honored at the luncheon as Jandoli School Alumna of the year was Denise Doring VanBurren. A 1983 graduate, VanBuren worked as a broadcast journalist and recently retired as vice president of public relations at Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation, where she was the longest-serving female executive in the history of the publicly traded utility.
The keynote speaker for the event was media critic and author Margaret Sullivan, a groundbreaking journalist and award-winning author with a particular focus on the relationship between the press and current threats to American democracy. Over the past six years, as media columnist for the Washington Post, Sullivan earned a reputation as one of the nation's premier press critics.
She is presently a visiting professor at Duke University. Previously, she was the public editor of the New York Times, that paper's longest-serving reader representative and ombudswoman.
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The Hellinger Award is named for Mark John Hellinger, an American journalist, theater columnist and film producer. It was established in 1960 by Jim Bishop, who worked with Hellinger at the New York Daily News and considered him his mentor.
Bishop would go on to establish his own fame as a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country, and as a best-selling author. Among Bishop's many works is "The Mark Hellinger Story: A Biography of Broadway and Hollywood."
Bishop began a long relationship with St. Bonaventure in 1958 when he was invited to speak at the university's Press Day event and was awarded an honorary doctorate. Soon afterward, Bishop began donating manuscripts and notebooks to form an archives of his writings at the university's Friedsam Memorial Library.