One of Clara Paulson’s pictures from her portfolio that was submitted to the Hearst Awards. Photo by Clara Paulson.
Two University of Tennessee at Chattanooga communication students placed nationally in the 2025 Hearst Awards for their work as communicators and storytellers.
Clara Paulson, a junior Brock Scholar in the UTC Honors College majoring in communication, placed 12th nationally in the Hearst Photo One competition. Emily Mitchell, who graduated in fall 2025 with a communication degree and a minor in rhetoric and professional writing, placed 13th nationally in the Hearst Multimedia Visual Storytelling Competition.
Clara Paulson
Paulson, who serves as the photo editor of the UTC Echo and works as a photographer in the UTC Division of Communications and Marketing, said earning the honor was “surreal.”
“I thought it was cool that we got to enter and compete, but I don’t know, we’ll see,” Paulson said, “and then I forgot about it.”
Mitchell had a similar experience.
“I never anticipated that there would ever be a situation where I would be entering a national competition in the first place, so to have done so well in it is crazy,” she said.
Mitchell’s story, “Carriage Chronicles,” featured a video component that explored Chattanooga’s iconic horse-drawn carriages. Paulson entered a six-photograph portfolio featuring photos she has taken during her time at UTC.
“Carriage Chronicles” and many of Paulson’s pictures can be found on Rising Rock. UTC Associate Lecturer Billy Weeks oversees the student-run publication, which also acts as a class.
“Emily Mitchell is maybe as gifted a videographer as I’ve ever had in class,” Weeks said. “She has a real skill of making her videos simple and easy to understand. They’re just beautiful. She moves the camera in and out and she gets close when needed. You see one of her videos and feel like you’ve been there.
“Clara is one of the most gifted student photographers here on campus at UT Chattanooga. She has worked really hard to take her still photography to the next level and it’s there. One of them was just a terrific portrait of her dad shot with a single light, with this beautiful light that comes across his face.”
Clara Paulson’s father is one of the pictures in her portfolio submitted to the Hearst Awards.
Paulson’s passion for photography comes from her grandfather, who showed her how to photograph birds.
“In 2019, for Christmas, I got my first camera,” she recalled. “It was one of the really old Canon cameras. I was so excited. My brother and I both ended up getting a camera, frames and one or two lenses, so we just immediately ran outside. We had bird feeders on our porch, so we just sat there and tried to get pictures of the birds.
“We were running around the neighborhood getting pictures of random things. I looked back on those photos, and I’m like, those are awful. We did not know what we were doing.”
Mitchell’s video editing journey started later.
Emily Mitchell
“I started making videos in high school,” she said. “I made these little YouTube video essays. It was just my creative outlet at the time, my hobby. It was pretty much the only thing that I really felt passionate about.”
Weeks said in the Hearst competition, students are competing against the best of the best at universities across the country, including designated journalism schools.
“To win a Hearst, to get named in the top 20 of a Hearst coming from UT Chattanooga is an amazing accomplishment,” he said. “We don’t have a school of communication. We don’t have a school of journalism. We have a few classes and some amazing professors who teach you how to write in the writing categories.
“For us to compete at the highest levels and to be named in that category of universities that are known for communication departments, that’s a huge honor and speaks well of the department here and of the professors and the communication department.”
Mitchell said the communication faculty made a difference in her collegiate career.
“I’m grateful to all the professors who gave me the knowledge I need to figure out my love for videography and video editing,” she said. “Even though I came in with a little bit of previous experience with it, I had literally no experience with a camera coming into it.
“I love that the communication department gave me that freedom to explore a little bit and discover what I was really passionate about. I really hope to do freelance videography eventually, later down the road. I would’ve never known if that was for me if I didn’t have that freedom to explore.”
Paulson said she’s developed as a photographer and communicator through her classes and extracurricular work.
“I honestly would not have chosen to go anywhere else to study journalism because I’ve learned so much here—not only how to do photography and how to write, but how to photograph people ethically and how to write ethically,” she said. “How to capture moments and how to tell a story, not just to capture photos but to capture emotion in detailed photographs and medium photographs.
“There are all these things I didn’t know before coming to college. There are so many other things that I just learned through experience being on the Echo, working with Angela Foster in the marketing and communications office, and being in Rising Rock.”
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UTC Department of Communication
Other photos submitted by Clara Paulson
