AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Student Media units brought home multiple national and state awards this semester. KVRX 91.7 FM, The Daily Texan and Texas Student Television, all student-led entities, were recognized for their production, reporting and creative work in the last school year. Students in TSM’s advertising sales and marketing office were also recognized in a college media business conference.
In October, campus radio station KVRX sent representatives to Denver to accept third place in Best Video Music Production at the 2025 College Radio Broadcasters, Inc. National Student Media Convention. The video is a recording of “Gus Baldwin and The Sketch Live,” which was performed during KVRX’s 30th Birthday Show at Mohawk Outdoors on Nov. 15, 2024.
“A lot of work went into it,” 2025-26 KVRX station manager Maile Carballo said. “We had a team, our production team, actually filming with really professional, nice film equipment all of the sets… so this Gus Baldwin and The Sketch video that we won an award for was filmed by students, produced by students and edited by students. And it’s really cool to get an award for it, too.”
The 30th Anniversary campaign raised more than $10,000, more than any KVRX fundraiser in the recent past. Carballo said she hopes to continue growing the station and is encouraged by the number of new students joining college radio.
“I think people respond really well to audio news and stories,” Carballo said. “And music I don’t think will ever go away. It’ll just continue to keep manifesting in different ways. And so although radio is an ‘old’ platform to listen to music and to share music with everyone, I think that there’s still… a new beginning for radio somewhere in the future.”
Around the same time, student newspaper The Daily Texan received three flagship Pinnacle Awards from the College Media Association. They won second place in Comics, honorable mention in Podcast, and first place in News Multimedia Package.
“To have that recognition is really impactful for our staffers,” said Kylee Howard, The Daily Texan’s Fall 2025 managing editor. “Our number one priority is we’re a student publication that’s writing for students, so I think it’s just really meaningful for the staffers to … get recognition nationally for it.”
“Silence on South Mall,” the news package that won first place, revisited the April 2024 protests at UT a year after they occurred. It broke down the timeline leading up to and after the protests, and it included a video component highlighting the experiences of student journalists who covered the nationwide university protests as they were unfolding.
“Even now … we’re seeing many, not necessarily cause and effect, but definitely some correlation with legislation and the campus-specific policy that is very much in line with those events,” said Newton Tran, The Daily Texan’s Spring 2026 manager editor. “So I think it’s important that we have some longevity within our coverage, and I think these awards speak to that.”
Texas Student Television won six of its seven nominations for the 2025 NATAS Student Production Awards. TSTV’s entertainment news show “Sneak Peek” won the Non-Fiction – Short Form category with its 30-year retrospective. It’s the first show produced by TSTV and the longest-running student show in the country. The program evolved from movie reviews to covering TV and pop culture, and it has landed several A-list celebrity interviews, including Matthew McConaughey, Will Ferrell, Nicolas Cage and many more.
“Considering that this show has served as a springboard for students’ careers in entertainment for longer than we’ve been alive, there’s always been an underlying pressure to maintain the quality of that legacy for future generations,” the producers of “Sneak Peek” said in a joint statement. “We don’t consider receiving awards to be our metric of success, but we hope that the recognition encourages future Sneak Peekers and TSTV members to continue creating more award-worthy segments.”
Finally, at the College Media Business and Advertising Managers conference last month, TSM’s sales and marketing students won three awards: first place for Best Sales Proposal, third place for Best Sales Promotional Materials and honorable mention for Best Social Media Promotion.
TSM alumna Sofia Vargas Karam, who’s now working at CG Life in New York City, said she was “excited” to hear that her sales proposal from her time as a TSM account executive won first place.
“During my time at Texas Student Media, I worked on a proposal for a big client, and it quickly became one of the projects I was most proud of,” Vargas said. “Thank you to (TSM advertising manager) Marlies Arevalo for trusting me and giving me the space to have real hands-on experience. I take the lessons I learned at TSM into my work today, and I’m so proud to have been a part of the team.”