UW-Whitewater senior wins award for public service announcement

August 19, 2004

WHITEWATER – University of Wisconsin-Whitewater senior Justen Preiss of Palmyra recently won national recognition for his public service announcement (PSA) “Every Vote Counts” in a contest co-sponsored by Music Television Networks (MTV) and the Association of Higher Education Cable Television Administrators (AHECTA). The 30-second PSA will become part of MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign encouraging college students to vote in the 2004 presidential election.

According to Preiss, the project initially began as a class assignment, but eventually grew into something bigger. “We were asked to develop a PSA asking students to vote in the upcoming election, and right away I had a lot of ideas, so I decided to run with it,” he said. “I had no idea that I would actually end up winning a national award.”

Preiss described the entire creative process as “pretty grueling,” taking at least 12 hours to edit and using a lot of new and unfamiliar editing and computer graphics technology. In the end, however, Preiss was pleased with the final outcome.
“To compete against students from some of the best universities in the country and win is just an amazing feeling,” Preiss said. “It’s reaffirmed that I’m getting a valuable education here at UW-Whitewater.”

UW-Whitewater was one of 125 universities throughout the nation to participate in the contest. This is the second straight year that a UW-Whitewater student has won in the PSA category. Dan Wiese ’04 won last year with his PSA “Kids and Guns.”

To view Preiss’ award-winning PSA, visit http://www.ahecta.org/students/index.php. His PSA will also air on mtvU, channel 25, on the university cable television network this fall.

For more information, contact Peter Conover at (262) 472-1332 or conoverp@uww.edu.