Last week, Harker journalism students visited New York City for the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Spring Convention at Columbia University, where they were presented with two CSPA Gold Crown awards for the student news website Harker Aquila and the Winged Post newspaper. The convention included workshops given by student journalists and awards ceremony for this year’s CSPA Crown winners.
Seniors Arjun Barrett, Tiffany Chang, Lavanya Subramanian, Jessica Tang, Sally Zhu and Sabrina Zhu, and juniors Edward Huang, Michelle Wei and Kevin Zhang were all presenters at the conference, where Harker students hosted a total of three sessions on topics including covering sensitive or controversial topics, apps that facilitate better coordination among newspaper staff and journalism’s ongoing “Humans of Harker” project.
Harker student publications have won four Crown Awards from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for their work during the 2020-21 school year. Harker received two Gold Crowns – one each for the student news website Harker Aquila and the Talon yearbook – and a Silver Crown each for the Winged Post newspaper and the student literary magazine HELM. The CSPA Crown Awards are given to digital and print publications that demonstrate overall excellence, based on evaluations of their design, photography, coverage and writing. In all, 817 publications were evaluated.
Last month, the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (CSPA) announced that two 2017-18 Harker journalism publications would receive Crown awards, the organization’s highest honor. The Winged Post was named a finalist in the High School Print News category, and the Talon yearbook was announced as a finalist later in the month. In March, the finalists will find out which level of Crown award they’ve received: gold or silver.
Upper school journalism teacher Ellen Austin noted that this will be “the first time that Harker journalism will receive multiple Crowns from CSPA in the same year, and it’s the first time that I, as an advisor, will have two publications that I advise getting Crowns at the same time.”