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.
On Feb. 4, Harker’s Student Diversity Coalition organized the Student Diversity Leadership Gathering, facilitated by Rodney Glasgow and Priyanka Rupani. Students from more than 30 Bay Area schools attended the gathering, which included group discussions, activities and keynote speeches on topics relating to diversity and inclusion at independent schools. Head to Harker Aquila to see Harker student journalists’ full coverage of the event.
Last month, sophomore Emma Milner published a feature on Harker Aquila about Robert Rothbart MS ’00, who now plays basketball professionally in the Israeli National League. The story was selected as Best of SNO by Student News Online and was praised by Rothbart, who said, “I have been interviewed hundreds of times in my career, and this is hands down the only article I cherish.” The story goes into Rothbart’s early life in former Yugoslavia and his difficulty adjusting to American life after joining Harker as a fourth grader when his mother was hired as a basketball coach. Rothbart began playing basketball at Harker that same year and soon decided he wanted to be a professional player, following in his parents’ footsteps.
Today, Schools Newspapers Online (SNO) selected junior Sarah Mohammed, senior Lucy Ge, sophomore Olivia Xu and junior Isha Moorjani’s Harker Aquila longform on Afghanistan for a Best of SNO award. The piece, which covers the struggles of Afghan people following the U.S. military’s exit from Afghanistan, includes interviews with Marjan Naderi, 2020 D.C. Youth Poet Laureate, and Dr. Mejgan Massoumi, a teaching fellow at Stanford’s Civic, Liberal and Global Education Program, who moved to the U.S. from Afghanistan in the early 1980s.
The story also gathers student reactions to the crisis and surveys the many reactions to the exit, both positive and negative. Work on the piece began at the start of the school year, and the finished article is the result of eight months of collaboration among its reporters. In addition to the Best of SNO award, the story was also published on the Best of SNO website, a recognition reserved for less than 10 percent of the submissions SNO receives every week.
Harker Aquila, the upper school’s student news website, was recently named a finalist in the 2018 National Scholastic Press Association’s Online Pacemaker competition. One of the oldest scholastic journalism awards, the Pacemakers are awarded to a range of school media outlets, including newspapers, yearbooks and magazines. Pacemaker candidates are evaluated on criteria including content quality, design and photography.
Judging for the competition will take place until April, as NSPA judges make almost daily visits to Harker Aquila and other finalists’ websites to assess them and determine the winners, which will be announced on April 14.
Journalism teacher Ellen Austin congratulated the Aquila staff and contributors, applauding them for their “hard work all year long.”