Newspaper ( Division 3)
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- Place Name: First Place
Contestant Name: A&M-Kingsville
Entry Title: Overall Excellence
Entry Credit: The South Texan
Judge Comment: Stories: The South Texan has succeeded in filling its pages with stories of interest to college readers.
Opinion: Compelling pieces on the tumblers, book bans, celebrity endorsements.
Page design: Layouts are nice and clean.
Photos are good, overall. The image of the cat in the cage is the best in the lot -- really communicated the scary situation with deep shadows and cat peering through bars.
Good mix of sports in sport section. Volleyball photo could have been better because it was very loose, and no ball was in the photo.
Reviews of movies and books were thought-provoking.
Need to perhaps read copy more closely before going to press. I am seeing punctuation, problems and typos.
Headlines are generally good, but the hed over the story on ocelots didn't work because "Deep in the heart of TAMUK" is far too general to work with a story that's about ocelots.
Try to avoid running photos an empty ball field. Insubstantial.
Constructive criticism aside, y'all have succeeded in putting together a wonderful newspaper. Keep it up!
- Place Name: Second Place
Contestant Name: Dallas College - Eastfield
Entry Title: The Et Cetera
Entry Credit: Sean Stroud, Clair Williamson, The Et Cetera Staff
Judge Comment: If this competition was just about front-page impact, Et Cetera would have won the whole thing with its big photo of that dog and accompanying story that was so hard-hitting. Good hed, too, on that story.
Cut-out sports photos grab the reader's attention. Nice.
Opinion pieces on Internet porn and Tik Tok ban are sure to be of interest to readers. Road safety opinion piece had a good personal touch.
Et Cetera has strong illustrations throughout.
Wildflowers piece was a delight.
Sports photos mostly dynamic and in your face.
Was a district sports championship worthy of taking up the entire front page? I must question that.
Photos are mostly good but with some misfires like one of the photos shot at the car show basically showing a few people’s backs and not much more.
Good job, overall.
- Place Name: Third Place
Contestant Name: Dallas College - Brookhaven
Entry Title: The Brookhaven Courier
Entry Credit: The Brookhaven Courier Staff
Judge Comment: I look to a newspaper's front page for its strongest work. Your front pages included stories about a search for a new college president and plans for a tuition increase. Good work! Those are subjects of high interest to your college readership. On the down side, some of the writing in the Courier's stories is a bit on the clunky side. In the story about the culinary program, verb tense jumps back and forth throughout the story, and that's not good.
Opinion: The harassment piece is good, but this entry is hurt by a typo in the first paragraph. The piece about concert complaints is sure to hit home with a lot of readers.
Sports: Decent stories, but photos needed some work. For instance, at least half of a photo of a baseball player sliding needed to be cropped out. Good hed on the Harvester Bees stinging Bears story. But why does the lede talk about the weather? Seems irrelevant. Photos tend to be too loose. NCAA pay story is timely and of great interest to the college audience.
Graphic novel reviews are cool little nuggets, and the covers of those novels really pop off the page. But the headline on this one is too small.
Problems with heds: Lower deck of Josey Records hed needs to be longer. Layout problem on this one: hed doesn't extend over entire story. And the lede on this story is long and confusing.
The Courier is doing a lot of things right, but it needs to work on plenty of stuff, too.
- Competition Comment: Comments I made with regard to contestants in another division's general excellence category apply here also, so I will largely repeat them:
All entries in this competition demonstrate that students appear to be working hard at being good journalists, and that is great to see. Every paper in this competition is producing stories that overwhelmingly are of interest to their student readership, and in many cases, those stories are written with verve. Applause to all of your for that.
I have a few words of advice to you about how to improve your work. Please don't take any of this personally; it's all meant as constructive criticism.
About your stories: Almost everyone needs to work on creating better ledes. Try to be more imaginative. Try to catch the reader’s attention. You will immediately put yourselves ahead in competitions like this if you would make your ledes better.
So many ledes in these competitions read something like this: "The Board of Regents met and discussed several issues on Thursday, Feb. 2." Instead, the reporter should have picked out a specific issue that was discussed during that meeting and made the lede about that. That lede probably should also say what the decision was on that issue.
Read your stories out loud to yourselves before you go to press with them. You can catch and change a lot of poorly constructed sentences that way.
Where photos are concerned, get closer to the action, use fewer posed photos and try to brighten up your images when possible. (I keep seeing dark images.) Also, try to get people into your photos more often. Photos of big, empty fields and empty rooms and buildings with no people in the frame (or just one person with his back to the camera) don't work well. With sports photos, there nearly always needs to be a ball in the photo if the sport involves a ball. For example, a photo of basketball players reaching for the sky, but with no ball in the photo? That doesn't work.
One more thing about writing: Read your stories out loud to yourself when you are finished. You will catch more errors and correct more clunky sentences that way.
