UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — With top-10 finishes in every competition discipline and a competitor in the individual national championships, Penn State’s journalism program again finished in the overall top 10 of the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program for 2025-26.
The competition, often referred to as “the Pulitzers of college journalism,” operates under the auspices of the accredited schools of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Monthly competitions in a variety of categories — writing, photojournalism, audio, television, podcasting and multimedia — are open to undergraduate students nationwide. During the 2025-26 competition cycle, there were a total of 1,353 entries submitted across the 14 competitions. Overall Intercollegiate winners are determined by the highest combined student point totals from those entries.
Penn State finished sixth overall — the highest finish of any program in the Big Ten Conference. The overall winner was North Carolina.
Points earned by individual students in the monthly competitions determine each discipline’s intercollegiate rankings, with schools accumulating points based on the entrants’ highest accumulated points in each category throughout the year.
Penn State finished seventh in writing, fourth in photo, seventh in audio/TV/podcast and eighth in multimedia.
Penn State perennially finishes in the top 10 of the Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards Program. In addition, during the past decade and a half its average finish in the program has been the best of any school in the Big Ten or Northeast.
The Intercollegiate Awards have been acknowledged since the inception of the program, and in 1990 monetary awards were added to the Hearst Journalism Awards Program budget. Publisher William Randolph Hearst established the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and The Hearst Foundation Inc. in the 1940s, a few years before his death in 1951. Since then, the foundations have awarded more than $1.5 billion in grants and programs.
Presently, 104 colleges and universities with accredited undergraduate journalism schools are eligible to participate in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program. Funded and administered for 66 years by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Journalism Program awards up to $700,000 in scholarships, grants and stipends annually.