Jacquie Marino, ’94

Alumna receives prestigious writing award

By Sarah Colvin, Kent State public relations student, and Elizabeth Slanina, MLIS ’07, Assistant Director, Alumni Relations

Kent State Honors College alumna and assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications Jacquie Marino, ’94, spent six months researching and conducting interviews to write “Blood Brothers” for the June 2006 issue of Cleveland Magazine.

“When 16 Marines from Cleveland’s 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment were killed in a single week, I knew their friends would have a story when they came home. I began interviewing Marines randomly, talking to any Marine who wanted to talk from 3/25, thinking I’d focus on a sniper unit whose losses got the most play in the media,” Marino told the Nieman Narrative Digest, which named her story a “notable narrative” on its Web site.

However, after getting to know two of the men through her interviews, Cpls. Stan Mayer and Jeff Schuller, she decided that the story should have a different focus, and it became a chronicle of several Brook Park Marines’ actual experiences. Mayer even supplied some of his journal entries for the feature.

Mayer wrote:
It’s August and everyone is dying. Sick of the faces, imagining what they look like in print, on the blurry front pages of newspapers at home that we’ll never see. Who is alive to witness their own 15 minutes? Not anyone who leaves us here. ... At 23 years old, oddly, this is where I finally begin to see whiskers growing on my face. My first facial hair’s come in gray. Twenty-three going on 60.

The 3/25 lost 48 Marines during one tour of duty in Iraq, 16 in that single August week.

“Blood Brothers” earned Marino the Gold Eddie Award for the best single story among regional publications at the 2007 Eddie Awards, a national competition sponsored by Folio magazine.

“I was really surprised my story was recognized because it was such a difficult story to read,” says Marino. “You always fear that it will come off as a journalist profiting off the experiences of others. But when these guys read what I wrote, they said, ‘You got it. You said what we were saying,’ and that meant more to me than winning the award.”

Jacquie Marino, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, leads a class discussion in the newly renovated Franklin Hall during the fall, 2007, semester. Photo by Gary Harwood

Marino has won many local awards and another national award for her outstanding writing abilities. In 2000, she received a Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications. In 2006, she received two first place awards from the Press Club of Cleveland and one first place award in consumer reporting from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. In 2007, she won first place in the Ohio Excellence in Journalism competition for “White Coats,” a series about medical students.

Marino, a 1994 graduate of Kent State, earned bachelor’s degrees in journalism and mass communication and political science. She also earned a master’s in nonfiction writing in 2002 from Johns Hopkins University.

“I started out as a political science major at Kent State, but I decided to study journalism during my sophomore year on the Washington Program in National Issues,” says Marino. “Of all the powerbrokers I met on that trip, I enjoyed hearing from the journalists the most. They had such passion and energy, and they truly loved what they did. So I picked up a double major in journalism my junior year, worked for the Daily Kent Stater, interned at two dailies and helped start a short-lived magazine. Interestingly, some of my professors who were so instrumental in my education are now my faculty mentors.”

She has been a journalist for 13 years and enjoys being a freelance writer and contributing editor for Cleveland Magazine. She has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Plain Dealer, Memphis and Agence France-Presse. She also freelances for other professional publications, including The Christian Science Monitor.

In addition to writing, she enjoys being an assistant professor of magazine journalism at Kent State.

In a sense, she has followed in the footsteps of her father, John A. Marino, who is an associate professor of business management technology at Kent State Trumbull. However, she says she did not think about teaching until she went to graduate school.

“I always loved writing,” she says. “When I taught an expository writing class at Hopkins, I realized why my dad always worked so much — teaching someone what you know and love is hard work. But when you finally get through, it’s very rewarding.”

On the Kent Campus, she teaches feature writing, newswriting and magazine publishing regularly. Recently she taught political journalism, a new special topics class she created with political science professor Thom Yantek.

“Now that I am a professor, I get great support from my colleagues and loads of inspiration from my students,” Marino says.

Her award-winning story is available at the archives of www.clevelandmagazine.com

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