The first attempt to offer a competition that would encourage students to meet readers in multiple ways produced coverage on standardized testing, on Make-A-Wish week, and on Bald 4 Bucks (raising money for a charity.
The basic contest rules were that the coverage had to include at least three different forms of media to provide coverage of one event or issue. All three of our place-winners included a form of print as well as multiple electronic media.
1st Place – Legend HS, The Forum newsmagazine and www.yourlegend.org / Carrie Denman, adviser
http://storify.com/
2nd Place – Mountain Vista HS, VISTAj / Mark Newton, MJE, adviser
http://storify.com/
3rd Place – Rampart HS, Rampages yearbook and KRAM / Patrick Moring, adviser
http://storify.com/
The three judges found something strong in each of our honorees. All agreed that what was missing was a clear focus in terms of where readers could go to access all the coverage. Print publications should point to online components, and vice versa.
No entry actually used a platform, such as Storify, to link all their coverage, particularly in social media, and embed that in their central website. As the judges noted, there was a nice combination of strong writing and reporting, strong use of social media and strong video in all three winners. It was just difficult to tie all those things together.
CHSPA made use of Storify to centralize all the links (and distribute the coverage to the judges), and you are invited to check out the range of coverage for each place-winner above.
Aaron Manfull, MJE, and chair of the JEA Digital Media Committee, wrote that part of that story is to have a place where it’s told. Maybe it’s something like this where all of their work has the same Category online:
http://fhntoday.com/category/snowcoming14/ (not saying that is best practices, but it’s an option). Another nice one that I like showing off is on a smaller scale is this:
http://www.mvnews.org/uncategorized/2013/02/05/students-create-dubstep-music/.
I think there are definitely ways print pubs can be showcased within and I like how both are reader friendly.
We hope to focus this competition more tightly for 2015. CHSPA believes media coverage needs to break down “silos” between student media and meet readers in whatever form readers want their news. The board welcomes all thoughts on how to improve this competition and on how to encourage convergent coverage more generally.
