Jeremy Beales, former colleague at Broadside

Whitney is a spectacular college journalist who has done incredible work. She is the founding director of Connect Mason, George Mason University's student media convergence site, which she has built from scratch since its founding in January. After being operational for less than three months Connect Mason was nominated for an ACP Online Pacemaker. In addition to providing an online portal to all of Mason's student media groups Connect Mason runs its own breaking news and multimedia operations. This is a Web site that didn't exist at all in the fall, and Whitney has done extraordinary work getting it up and running at a high level.

Two things stand out about Whitney Rhodes: her commitment and her shear talent. The first time I realized what a special journalist Whitney is was last spring. Whitney had just started in her position as assistant online editor for Broadside, the weekly paper at  George Mason University, when the Virginia Tech tragedy happened. Whitney swung into action. She began to work on the story immediately and dropped everything for the rest of the day, staying in the newsroom with me that night updating our website until after 1 a.m. The next day we asked her if she was willing to go to Virginia Tech that night to report on the candlelight vigil being held at the Tech drill field. Whitney agreed immediately, and she play multiple roles, taking video, doing reporting and collecting audio, even though she had never worked with a video camera before. Her work at Virginia Tech was absolutely outstanding and added a tremendous amount of value to our coverage.

The other decision that Whitney made during the time I have known her that exemplifies her abilities is her decision to leave Broadside and found Connect2Mason.com in the winter of 2007. Whitney had been Broadside’s online managing editor for a semester at that point, but she had consistently had to struggle for resources and attention from the Broadside editor in chief. When the opportunity to strike out on her own appeared Whitney jumped on it and struck out on her own. In less than a semester she built Connect Mason to a formidable news source. Whitney worked nonstop to get Connect Mason off the ground and was incredibly successful. I don’t know of anyone else who would have been capable of succeeding the way she did in such a short time.

Connect Mason

Whitney founded Connect2Mason.com, a convergence site featuring content from Broadside, WGMU, MCN, VoxPop and other student media outlets, as well as from individual contributors from the George Mason community.

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Source | The Broadside
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