They say journalists don’t make the big bucks, but Medill senior Jesse Abrams-Morley pulled in $15,000 during one week in June.

Abrams-Morley, a former Daily Forum Editor, placed first in the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s national writing competition and was named one of the Scripps Howard Foundation’s “Top 10” scholars of 2004-05.

“It’s one of those things that’s sort of impossible to describe,” he said. “You never wake up thinking that two of the top journalism foundations are going to honor you.”

The annual Hearst event is the culmination of multi-tiered competitions. All accredited undergraduate journalism programs can submit two articles to six Hearst competitions during the school year. The six first-place winners, plus two other top finishers, were invited to the annual National Writing, Photojournalism and Broadcast News Championships in June.

Abrams-Morley’s award-winning column “Stand up for sitting; Students’ allegiance exercised in protest” was published in The Daily and praised Evanston community members who protested a student who got detention for sitting down during the Pledge of Allegiance.

His column was judged the best editorial of the school year, and for that he won $2,000 and an invitation to the national writing competition.

“(The Hearst competition) is widely considered in journalism education to be the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism,” Medill Assistant Dean Roger Boye said.

Abrams-Morley spent several days at the end of Spring Quarter in San Francisco for the championships. The first day he and the seven other students there were sent into the Mission District of San Francisco and had to come out with a story by the next afternoon. The second phase required a trip to City Hall, where students wrote a profile and a news story.

Abrams-Morley said the competition was stressful, but he was prepared for it because he had taken part in the same competition last year. He said he was happy with how his stories turned out, but called his win “a total shock.” He credited his risk-taking as the reason for his success.

“I really felt like I took a lot of chances with the writing,” he said. “Sometimes people who have a lot of experience get caught up with a conservative writing style.”

Abrams-Morley began his stories with heavy description and led into a series of questions — not exactly textbook journalism, he said.

“I was very colloquial, very chatty, and it worked,” Abrams-Morley said.

In addition to the $5,000 Hearst scholarship, one week later he was announced as one of Scripps Howard Foundation’s top 10 student journalists. About 50 undergraduate journalism programs were invited to submit one nominee to the annual competition, and Abrams-Morley took home one of the $10,000 prizes.

“Yeah, it was a good week,” he said. “Considering last week I only made $300.”

Eight of the past 16 Hearst national writing champions have been from Medill, and NU journalism students have been in the Scripps top 10 in five of the past six years.

“That’s domination is what that is,” Boye said. “Jesse’s name is added to a very prestigious honor roll of Medill people.”

Campus Editor Jaime Griesgraber is a Medill junior. She can be reached at [email protected].