UGM Communication Studies Students’ Achievement in the Padjadjaran University Epicentrum Competition

Yogyakarta, May 12th 2021━Two teams of students from the Communication Studies Department of Gadjah Mada University (UGM) had an achievement in the Epicentrum Competition held by Padjajaran University (06/05). The Restu Ibu team from batch 2019 won the first prize in the Media in Action (Mediation) competition, meanwhile the Manjjap team from the 2018 batch held the second prize in the Jurnalistic Parade competition. 

Epicentrum is an annual competition for Communication Studies students held by the Faculty of Communication of Padjajaran University. The Mediation competition held by the Media Production Management major this year chose the theme of digital media acceleration in the startup track. The competitors are challenged to create a video content, poster, and ads audio from a startup with the aim to help develop a startup business during the pandemic. 

The Restu Ibu team consists of Agam Syah Fadila, Anugerah Dewa Ale, Felicia Vaniadiva, Luthfiana Nur, and Naranathadewi. The startup that they chose was Rebricks, which is an ecopreneur startup that uses plastic waste for construction materials. 

“The important point of our work is that we, as the young generation, can contribute in saving the environment and reducing plastic waste, one of them by sending our plastic waste to Rebricks,” Agam said as the team leader. 

Agam said that even though they can’t do the project in one place, they share their task to create the three creative outputs in the final project. In the process of creating, they also did an online interview with the Founder and CEO of Rebricks to dig some insights about the brand. 

Meanwhile, the Manjjap team did the Journalistic Parade competition. They designed some innovations for Indonesia’s press that are affected in the economic or employee aspect by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Manjjap team that consists of Lanny Rahma, Rizky Adinda, and Renatta Karuna, created an application based journalistic comic platform called NewToon. The hope is that this innovation can be an alternative to news reading with a visual format that can match the digital media trend as well as be able to give a solution to the employee issue. 

“Though the journalistic comic is not 100% novel, the NewToon can offer several new things due to the collaboration and the new target which is the visual thinker. There is no limitation to the type of content that can be published in NewToon because this platform is inclusive so comics about in-depth journalism are not restricted to certain topics,” Lanny said as the head of the team. 

The challenge in creating NewToon is the research and the task of understanding the ecosystem of journalism in Indonesia. Every aspect offered needs to be based on knowledge on what is happening in real life; starting from the product, publication, target audience, as well as profit. Other than that, the Manjjap team also needs to consider the look of the application that supports users’ comfort.

Though they got second place, The Manjjap team said that they got a lot of input from the judges regarding the journalistic comic trend as well as a systematic media publishing mechanism. For the Manjjap team, participating in this Epicentrum is very useful for them, not only because they won, but also because they got new insights and information. 

Congratulations for the winners!