High school awards contests

For several years Cerritos Journalism has maintained a relationship with the Southern California Journalism Education Association by hosting its annual Write-Off competitions. Aside from wanting to support good journalism at the high school level, an obvious hoped for advantage would be to establish connections with local area high school programs.

But the problem is that most local area high schools do not participate in SCJEA.

So this year, after a number of years of planning, we’ve launched our first district-wide high school journalism awards competition that includes 13 or so categories area newspapers and yearbooks can enter work done by students this school year.

We’re a bit disappointed that only a few school newspapers submitted entries … no yearbooks. We’re going to extend the deadline a week and reach out again to see if we can get a few more high schools to participate. If not, we’ll go with those schools who did enter and see if we can build on that number next year.

Podcasting assignment in newswriting

I’ve been struggling on what kind of podcasting assignment to give my beginning newswriting students. This is the first semester I’m going to try something and I’m still at a loss on what exactly to have them do. The purpose is to introduce them to podcasting, but how to do it is a mystery.

Complicating the matter is the fact that we’ve got so little time left in the class and I want them to concentrate on the the City Council assignment. Bam! Why not have them do a podcast on the City Council assignment? It can be about the story. It can be about writing the story. The result is not something we’ll likely actually publish, but the process can take place.