Newspaper ( Division 4)
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- Place Name: First Place
Contestant Name: Dallas College - North Lake
Entry Title: News-Register
Entry Credit: Ti-Ying Li, News-Register Staff
Judge Comment: The News-Register was strong across the board. Design is clean. Photos good. Opinion pages strong. Front-page stories were important to student readership. (Tuition increase, how to register to vote, scholarships, etc.) Good work!
- Place Name: Second Place
Contestant Name: Northeast Texas Commmunity College
Entry Title: Spring 2024, Back To School Edition, Fall 2024
Entry Credit: Eagle Staff, Liliana Torreblanca
Judge Comment: Design was strong throughout entries. Photos not bad. Your back-to-school edition was fantastic, serving your readership well.
- Place Name: Third Place
Contestant Name: Mary Hardin-Baylor
Entry Title: The Bells – Ringing in the Truth Since 1866
Entry Credit: Xhaxany Cuellar, Jackson Keenan, Bradley Melchor, Allyson Hinkle
Judge Comment: Design decent but could be cleaner. Same story on photos. Stories on international students, RA life, Perry's speech were strong.
- Place Name: Honorable Mention
Contestant Name: St. Edward's University
Entry Title: Hilltop Views
Entry Credit: Claire Lawrence, Lola Claire, Scarlett Houser, Isis Debrock
Judge Comment: Hilltop Views does some good work. That includes the special section on education at St. Ed's. The section did a nice job of laying out much of what the college has to offer. However, the Hilltop Views' good work is marred by some layout deficiencies and headline problems. The heads are way too long, and the spacing between words is way too big.
- Competition Comment: All entries in this competition demonstrate that students appear to be working hard at being journalists, and that is great to see. Every paper in this competition is producing stories overwhelmingly are of interest to their student readership, and in many cases, those stories are written with verve.
My advice to improve:
Where stories are concerned, 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 issues on Thursday, Feb. 2." Instead, the reporter should have picked out a specific issue that was discussed and made the lede not only all about that but also state what the decision was on that issue.
Also, 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. Also, try to get people into your photos more often. Photos of big, empty fields and empty rooms and buildings with no people (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.
