Because of youtube's limitations on how long a video can be, I broke up the interview into five parts. In part 1, Page shares his views on how to balance the academic demands of college with the need to gain hands-on experience.

Part 2: Page's early interests in journalism, and why he chose to study at Ohio University.

Part 3: Page, on the need for journalism students to be flexible when they come out of school. Of particular interest to me is his discussion about an international opportunity early on in his career.

Part 4: Page, on the changes he has witnessed in journalism and media during his career.

Page 5: Page discusses his contributions to journalism.

Matt Zapotosky and Meghan Louttit (twitter: @mlouttit) have been full-timers at the Washington newspaper for a little more than two years. Yet, as these interviews indicate, they already have first-hand experience when it comes to the organization changing how it operates.

I've sometimes wondered over the years if this was such a good idea, given how many outstanding graduating seniors and grad students we have each year. Sure, there's always a "top" GPA, but rarely does that translate into who wins top graduate awards. After all, a journalism education is more than just about grades.

On the other hand, our winners invariably are in the top 5-10% grade point averages. They also have had the kind of impact outside the classroom that means they will be remembered for years to come. So, once again, we used the occasion of our annual awards banquet to recognize top graduating seniors. The text below borrows heavily from the script that Tom Hodson read from at the banquet.

This year we salute the following top graduates:

Advertising: Lauren Miller

From day one, Lauren Miller hit the ground running in the Scripps School of Journalism. Lauren graduated with 40 hours more than the minimum of 192. That says much about her intelligence, motivation and focus.

Lauren has been active in the American Advertising Federation National Student Competition every year, including presenting for the Coca Cola team in her freshman year. She served as Ad Club's treasurer, was a member of the executive board of directors, marketing and research director and campaign director during her time at Scripps. It's no surprise that due to her commitment and hard work, Ohio University won the National Competition in 2008. And the 2009 Ad Club's campaign for the Century Council will launch this year.

During her time at OU, Lauren was also a sales representative for University Directories and was ranked number one on the team. According to her professors, no one has done so well in the advertising sequence and accomplished so much for the OU Advertising Association.

Broadcast: Drew Schaar

Drew walked into WOUB radio and TV his sophomore year and never looked back. He’s been extremely active with WOUB’s Newswatch program, radio newscasts and websites as an anchor, producer, and reporter. He recently finished producing an hour-long live program on the Diabetes Crisis in southeast Ohio.

Drew interned at WBNS-TV in Columbus and two television stations in Dayton. He’s also been a peer mentor the last three years for the Learning Community program and he has done an outstanding job. He’s active in the student chapter of the Radio Television Digital News Association, and recently attended the national convention in Las Vegas. Drew also is involved with Omicron Delta Kappa, a community service and leadership organization.

Carr Van Anda: Bethany Williams

This is the first year we've given an outstanding senior award in the Carr Van Anda sequence. We felt the need to do so because we now have quite a number of students electing this inter-disciplinary option.

Bethany Williams transferred into the Scripps Journalism School after her freshmen year. Using the Carr Van Anda option, she has pursued her interest in documentary journalism, blending courses in broadcast journalism, Media Arts & Studies as well as courses from the Film School. And she did all of that while maintaining a near perfect GPA.

Bethany interned with the NPR program "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" last summer and plans to pursue her career as a documentary film maker.

Bethany graduated in March and recently returned to the U.S. from a six-week writing trip to Europe.

Journalism HTC: Emily Grannis

Our outstanding HTC senior, Emily Grannis, was campus senior writer for The Post since March 2007, reporting on the OU administration and Faculty Senate as well as student affairs and the Student Senate.

Emily has had a number of internship opportunities during her years at OU. During the summer of 2007, she worked at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. Since Fall 2007, she has worked with me when I’m serve as a visiting trial judge, doing independent work in legal research and writing.

She’s contributed print and online content to the Legal Times, a weekly Washington, D.C. newspaper, and she’s worked in the Public Information Office (PIO) of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Her outstanding honors thesis on the development of the Paraguayan press is titled "Hard Pressed: The Paraguayan Media and Democratic Transition, 1980s-1990s."

Magazine: Sarah Binning

The Outstanding Magazine Senior, Sarah Binning, knew without doubt that she’d chosen the right career path after she served as editor in chief of Southeast Ohio magazine for the Spring 2010 issue ??" In case you haven’t purchased your copy yet, look for the issue with the cover featuring three child ballet dancers. She was also the magazine’s copy chief for the Winter issue, adeptly supervising a staff of eight copy editors.

Sarah has immersed herself in a variety of journalism experiences outside Scripps as well. She was an intern at Teen Voices Magazine in Boston, an alternative publication whose staff and college-age interns mentor some eighty Boston teen girls as editors each year. During winter breaks she interned at her hometown paper, The Bryan Times, reporting on farm and education news, creating online videos and designing the paper’s entertainment pages.

Sarah also minored in English, and earned a near perfect GPA.

News Editorial: Emily Mullin

Emily Mullin, just couldn’t wait to jump in to her chosen career.

In the summer before she started classes at OU, Emily worked as a freelancer for her hometown paper in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. That fall, she adopted a new hometown paper and started a four-year stint writing for The Athens News. During that time she’s been an opinion columnist, campus reporter and editorial assistant.

Emily didn’t limit her experience to newspapers, she also worked for The Government Channel in Athens and was a talk-show host for the All Campus Radio Network. And she served as one of our Student Ambassadors.

Emily has had internships with the Tribune-Review newspaper of Greensburg, Pennsylvania; the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire in Washington, D.C.; and Columbus Business First. Most recently, she has worked as a freelancer for the Cincinnati Business Courier.

Along the way, she earned a First Place SPJ Mark of Excellence Award, and last fall she was one of only 40 college students nationwide chosen to attend the Business Journalism Consortium in New York City. Emily recently learned that she’s been named a Pulliam fellow, and will work on the business desk at the Indianapolis Star this summer.

Online Journalism: Ryan Lytle

Our top online journalism senior is Ryan Lytle. Ryan transferred into the Scripps Journalism School after his second year at OU.

In the past two years he completed three internships with the Cincinnati Enquirer's website, the washingtonpost.com, and most recently with the Today Show. Ryan was fortunate to be working at the Today Show when OU defeated Georgetown in the Big Dance. And of course Today Show co-host and alum Matt Lauer wanted to celebrate, so Ryan made his network debut, chest bumping, and nearly knocking out Matt on live TV!

When Ryan wasn’t off in New York or Washington, he worked at The Post, WOUB, and Speakeasy, all while maintaining a terrific GPA.

Public Relations: Adria Courtot

Our Outstanding PR Senior's accomplishments become even more impressive when you know she only transferred to Ohio University two years ago and then still had to transfer into our program.

From the moment she stepped foot on campus, Adria Courtot was determined to achieve her goal of transferring into Scripps. She joined PRSSA and ImPRessions right away and made a big impact with both. She served as PRSSA's Vice-President of Internal Relations and she previously edited PRSuccess, the chapter newsletter.

In ImPRessions she served as an Account Executive where she supervised ten other students on the Up 'Til Dawn account. Adria interned with the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce.

Adria was an excellent student who maintained a high GPA and was on the Dean's List and was the recipient of the Dean's Scholarship.

Overall Outstanding Senior: Chelsea Toy

Chelsea Toy exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to succeed in the modern media business. She produces hard news, long-form features, press releases, and marketing plans. She blogs, tweets, and shoots video. She speaks Spanish and Swahili and has basic conversational skills in German and Malay.

She interned with a magazine and a PR firm in South Africa, and Amnesty Int’l in Washington, D.C. She worked as a senior campus reporter for the Athens News, covering OU politics and the ongoing budget crisis.

During the past four years, Chelsea won 10 journalism awards and scholarships, including the competitive Roy W. Howard National Collegiate Reporting Award and the David L. Shashower Visionary Scholarship in Communication from Liggett-Shashower in Cleveland.

In her free time, she competes in rodeos and has earned national and Canadian barrel-racing titles. For her senior honors project, she launched The Barrel Racing Blog, which receives 3,000 hits each month and she explored the ethical issues involved when journalists cover communities of interest in which they participate.

Not surprisingly, she already has a full-time job as an assistant editor for Horse & Rider where she will produce content for its four-color glossy consumer magazine and companion web products, as well as develop a social media strategy.

Chelsea also has excelled in the classroom, transferring into the Honors Tutorial College as a sophomore and earning a near-perfect GPA. She served our school as a Scripps Ambassador and helped recruit dozens of top ranking prospective students by leading tours and sharing her college experiences with them. We wish continued success as she moves into full-time professional life.

Masters student: Aisha Mohammed

Aisha Mohammed wrote what Pat Washburn considers to be one of the top five papers in his two and a half decades of teaching the historiorgraphy class. She wrote about magazines produced by sex workers for sex workers.

Doctoral student: Jen Lovejoy

Jennette Lovejoy has a history of publishing and presenting academic articles that would be impressive for a tenure-track assistant professor, and she has yet to defend her thesis. She already has a job with the University of Portland. And she throws a football with a nice, tight spiral.

The article reviews well known majors at lots of colleges and universities in the region. For Ohio University, Pittsburgh Magazine suggests that "Right" brainers consider, you guessed it, journalism.

"As journalism moves online, the news is that Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism continues to rank among the top journalism schools in the United States. Majors can choose nontraditional undergrad course sequences such as advertising, online journalism and public relations."

Unfortunately, the article also contains a common factual error in implying that "famous alumni include TODAY's Matt Lauer." In fact, Matt graduated with a degree from the School of Telecommunications*, not Journalism. But hey, it certainly is the case -- as was also pointed out -- that "that's why a Scripps undergrad usually lands an internship on that NBC-TV show each year."

I should point out that sometimes we are lucky enough to have TWO interns at a time at the TODAY show. That would not happen without Matt Lauer's loyalty to Ohio University.

*Now called the School of Media Arts and Studies.

It truly has been an honor and a thrill to have been director of the school that gave me my undergraduate degree. Besides a top-flight education, it has given me life-long friendships among our alumni and some of the country’s media elite.

I have had a continual love affair with this school for over four decades and those powerful feelings have only grown with each new class of students and each new innovation in journalism education that we have implemented.

In every career, there is a time to begin -- a time to meet new challenges -- and a time to say goodbye. It is now time for me to do the latter…to step down as director and take my place among the faculty of this fine school. Although in a new capacity, I will continue to serve students -- in a different yet just as important way -- as a teacher and mentor.

Over the past seven years, we made great strides in bringing new faculty to the school, upgrading our curriculum, and raising substantial outside money to support our students and their dreams. We have pumped up enrollment and kept the quality of our student body high. We are one of the top journalism schools in the country and that is something in which I take great pride.

I want to thank my colleagues on the faculty and our dedicated staff for all of their substantial contributions.

It is time, however, to turn the reins over to new leadership -- a new generation. It’s time for even newer ideas, newer approaches to journalism education, and new energy. I have every confidence that the new director, Dr. Robert Stewart, and his team will take the school to even greater heights. He will bring his steady hand and innovative mind to the directorship and motivate his colleagues to bring new vitality to the school.

We are poised on the precipice of being an even greater school than we are today. We must ever press forward and push ourselves to more substantial accomplishments and even higher standards. The media world is changing and we are at the center of that revolution.

I leave the directorship with a sense of pride in what we accomplished but with an even greater hope and dream of what tomorrow can bring.

If you haven't been following the Ryan Lytle adventure, you may not know about his famous chest-bump with Today Show host and fellow Bobcat Matt Lauer. The "incident," seen far and wide on youtube and other online video services, took place at the tail end of Ryan's internship.

If you want to help Ryan achieve "TJ" status for MTV, follow him on Twitter, at twitter.com/rlytle. Good luck Ryan!

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident."

Sometimes it's the dog that doesn't bark, the thing that's supposed to happen but doesn't, that merits scrutiny.

As a serious dog lover and the proud owner of a black Lab and a basenji, I know that pets can sometimes be unpredictable. But they also move in their circles with as much regularity as the planets in their orbits. If Hailey and Chance don't ask for a walk shortly after dawn, I know something must be seriously wrong.

So imagine my reaction over the last year as potential students flooded the Scripps School of Journalism with inquiries about the master of science and doctoral programs. Scores of applications arrived before the Feb. 1, 2010, deadline for those seeking financial aid for the following fall. Dozens more trickled in over the next few months, including some who eventually received financial aid as a handful of offers unexpectedly became available.

Out of this process, the Scripps School will welcome 16 new master's students and four new PhD students in fall 2010.

The field is very strong. Among the graduate students who begin arriving over the summer are a newspaper journalist with 17 years at the Dayton Daily News, USA Today’s Tennessee correspondent, an international coordinator for the Korean Defense Industry Association, an Indian journalist who speaks six languages, and an in-depth reporter for the English-language China News magazine. About half of the incoming grad students have backgrounds in journalism; the other half come from such fields as music, English, political science, and theater.

The reason this merits attention is that given the national eulogizing over the "death" of the news media, it may strike some observers as surprising that interest in journalism graduate studies is stronger than ever. And it's not just at Scripps. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Maryland also reported heightened interest in their journalism graduate programs for the year just concluded.

At the Scripps School, students in both the undergraduate and graduate programs know they will get a solid grounding in the skills of the news media and the new media. They learn to communicate in new ways, using new platforms. And at the graduate level, they gain the added benefit of doing cutting-edge research about the science of mass communication and how the field is changing. This gives them the knowledge and flexibility to change with the industry while others lag behind.

As the media continue to evolve, our grad students remain grounded in the rich tradition of media theories and practice, but gain the cognitive skills to assess and shape the future.

Let the pundits howl and bark about the future of the news media. Scripps continues to quietly run with the big dogs.

...Mike Sweeney, Scripps graduate director

While many of the references in the ode might be considered "inside baseball," Evarts' words and sentiments on behalf of Sandra, Anne and Pat nevertheless can be enjoyed by any student or colleague of these three. I offer the ode here, with Dru's permission.

Ode to Sandra Haggerty, Anne Cooper, and Pat Westfall

Read at a luncheon in their honor June 4, 2010

There once was a J-school glorious
Whose faculty was very borious,
Made up entirely of men,
All roosters, with no hen,
Nationally typical, not notorious.

Then the regents approved a mass comm Ph.D.
And Dru Riley Evarts said, “That’s for me.”
The faculty found her sufficiently bright,
She proved that she could read and write;
She became an instructor in ’73.

She entered the formerly all-male lair;
The men were welcoming, not in despair;
She taught all the editing sections,
Served up knowledge like confections,
And, finally, she became the search chair.

Not wanting to have the school in the lurch,
She produced Sandra Haggerty in her very first search;
The faculty found Sandra qualified and fine,
So she joined the Scripps group in ’79,
Delivered from Utah and the Mormon Church.

Anne Cooper was pursued while at UNC,
Where she was finishing up her Ph.D.;
But she took a detour to SMU
Before deciding that was a dumb thing to do,
In ’85 she came here with an air of glee.

Pat Westfall was running her Iowa farm
And teaching at UI with her other arm
When we grabbed her by her ear
And said, “Pat, you have to come here”;
’86 brought us her and all her charm.

We had these three women under contract.
So, with methodology quite inexact,
Let’s look at their records here
And adventures both far and near;
They know we don’t have any tact.

Sandra bought a house that Dru recommended,
But it wasn’t exactly what she had intended;
When her girls grew up, she was out of there,
And got an apartment, but no one knew where;
And access to her home phone had ended.

Sandra traveled to four continents
To see if the press published without consent
Or was attacked by the people in charge
Or harassed by the citizens at large;
She used her findings as course content.

Anne most brilliantly contrived
During the fall in which she arrived
To go uptown for Halloween,
Thinking she would not be seen;
She found it noisy and beehived.

She was struggling to get out a bar door when
She fell into the arms of Charles Chen;
“You can’t get to your car,” he said,
“How about coming to my house instead?”-
Their long romance began right then.

Anne taught and served in administrative posts,
But she loved international travel the most;
Charles spoke Chinese and Japanese,
So working in the Orient was a breeze;
In countless countries they have Anne toasts.

Pat arrived in Athens with her loving friend;
It had four legs and a tail at the end;
Now this species is plural -- legs 8, tails 2;
Fezzik and Mandy, her friends and dogs on queue.
Their lovely country setting makes a perfect blend.

Pat taught magazine courses, advised our lab mag;
Helped bring in new media, and, just to brag,
She emphasized critical thinking, no doubt
Presuming the students knew what it is about;
A spirit like hers could just never sag.

Pat’s flower gardens are a glorious sight,
Her oils and computer art a ceremonial rite;
She has turned out articles and books
That populate people’s nooks;
Her friends enjoy her home with delight.

So we end this sketch of these great gals,
Who’ve been long-term colleagues, even pals
To everyone in this school --
The uptight and the cool,
Their loss is like a diet with zero cals.

Listen to the ode.