Last weekend, five Harker students were awarded in the Journalism Education’s spring 2023 National Student Media Contest. Jessica Wang, grade 10, received a Superior award in Editorial Writing; junior Desiree Luo was given an Excellent award in the Sports Writing category; sophomore Felix Chen received an Excellent award in Press Law and Ethics; Mirabelle Feng, grade 10, was awarded Superior in Literary Magazine: Illustration; and senior Katie Wang received an Honorable Mention in Photography Portfolio.
National Student Media Contests are held twice a year in the fall and spring. Submissions are evaluated by a team of judges, whose critiques are made available to the students entering the competition. Winning entries receive awards at three levels: Superior, Excellent and Honorable Mention.
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.
Yesterday, the Journalism Education Association awarded Harker’s journalism programs its First Amendment Press Freedom Award. Harker was one of just 16 high schools nationwide to receive the award, which is given annually to high schools that uphold First Amendment rights for students and teachers through student-run media. Awardees are chosen by representatives from the JEA, National Scholastic Press Association and Scroll International Honorary Society. Harker received the award for the first time last year.
“The three-month-long application process incorporated two rounds and required statements from publication advisers, student editors and administration,” said journalism director Whitney Huang. “We believe that this award validates Harker Journalism’s commitment to civic engagement hand-in-hand with the embodiment of Harker’s mission statement.”
All of the schools that received the award will be recognized at the Spring JEA/NSPA High School Journalism Convention, which will take place April 20 in San Francisco.
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.
On Nov. 28, Simar Bajaj ’20 received the Foreign Press Association’s Science Story of the Year award, for a piece he penned for The Guardian in August about pig-to-human heart transplants. Bajaj, who currently attends Harvard University, went to London to receive the award in person. A video has been posted of Bajaj receiving the award, as well as some of his remarks. The FPA is the world’s oldest press organization, dating back to 1888. Bajaj is the youngest awardee in the organization’s history.
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.
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.
Today, the Journalism Education Association (JEA) named Harker as one of 17 recipients of the 2022 First Amendment Press Freedom Award. Public and private high schools selected for this recognition — determined by representatives from the JEA, National Scholastic Press Association and Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society — are judged to have actively upheld their students’ and teachers’ First Amendment Rights, particularly as they concern student-run media. This marks Harker’s first time receiving the award.
The process of selecting schools for the award began with a questionnaire submitted by advisors and at least one editor. Schools advancing to the next stage were then tasked with submitting responses by their principals, media advisers and student editors, as well as published media and school policies.
All 17 schools receiving the award will be honored at a special ceremony in Los Angeles on April 7, as part of the Spring JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention.
On Monday, Harker journalism students spoke via Zoom with Jon Elswick, the Associated Press photo editor based in Washington, D.C., whose team covered the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year and received a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the murder of George Floyd and the national reaction it received.
Elswick briefly surveyed his career as a photojournalist, which began in Chicago, where he mainly covered sports teams such as the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, and later moved to Washington. When the George Floyd protests erupted in the summer of 2020, Elswick worked in Washington, receiving and editing photos submitted to him by AP photojournalists from across the country, including the images that won his team the Pulitzer. “We had photographers from really all over the country,” he said. “Two of our photographers in Washington took photos that were part of those entries, and I happened to be editing both of them.”
On the day of the Jan. 6 riots, Elswick was one of three AP photo editors in Washington, D.C, “which doesn’t seem like very many, and it’s not very many,” he said. “Up until about a year and a half ago, there were only two of us here in Washington.” Elswick said his team didn’t predict there would be violence, but nevertheless made sure to have the right people in place. Two photographers specializing in protest and riot coverage – one of which was Julio Cortez, who recorded one of the George Floyd protests’ most famous images – were in Washington to cover the rally that led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol. “We didn’t know what was going to happen, but those photographers that specialize in this, we provide them vests, helmets, masks, just things to keep them safe,” said Elswick, who emphasized that photographers are not sent alone to events that may become violent. “They’re always paired up, because while they’re both shooting, they can both watch each other’s back.”
AP also had photographer Evan Vucci in the “tight pool” of media crew who followed former President Donald Trump to the rally, and “back stand” photographer Jacqueline Martin at the site of the rally. “This is pretty typical coverage for what AP does with any big campaign event,” Elswick explained. “The back stand photographer gets there and … they’re on the back stand further away from the stage.”
Elswick recalled that AP had a pair of photographers each at the site of the rally and at a place near where the rally took place. A last-minute decision was made to send another staff photographer with a freelancer, who were given the task of heading to the Capitol after Trump was heard saying a protest would be taking place there.
When he noticed that crowds outside the Capitol Building were becoming violent, Elswick began contacting the photographers placed in building, one of which was Andy Harnack. “I said, ‘Hey, get to a window where you can see something. What’s going on outside?’” he recalled. It was hard to keep up with what was going on, but I had the other photographer, Manny Ceneta, in the Statuary Hall.” Elswick instructed Ceneta to make his way to the north end of the building. “And almost immediately when he got over there, he started encountering protestors, smoke, smoke bombs, pepper spray,” Elswick said.
Elswick, who was working from home at the time, recalled telling his wife as the event unfolded, “You’re not going to believe the pictures I am just seeing.” While it was common for photographers and photo editors in Washington to see Secret Service members and response teams carrying weapons, “We don’t see these police officers drawing their weapons, and these were all pretty much plainclothes capitol police security, whether they would be security for the House leadership or just regular undercover or plainclothes officers. They all had their firearms out and pointed to the door.”
As soon as they were able, the photo editors confirmed the safety of the photographers, one of whom, Scott Applewhite, had been locked in the Senate chamber. Despite the chaos of that day, the team never lost sight of their objective. “We just knew what we needed to do was to get the pictures out, and let the pictures tell the story and get them linked to the stories that the reporters are doing,” Elswick said. “Finally, the photographers got back into the capitol and the business of certifying the election continued and finished at three in the morning.”
The new middle school student newspaper, the Eagle Gazette, was distributed to the campus community just before the winter break. Pieced together by a large team of editors and writers, the paper covers a wide variety of topics, including food, school life and athletics.
Its origins stretch back to the start of the 2021-22 school year, when a newspaper club was founded and quickly grew beyond expectations, eventually bringing in more than 30 staff members. Advisors Jennifer Walrod and Julie Meadows intended for the newspaper to be almost entirely student-run, limiting their role to weekly meetings with editors to discuss their plans and any difficulties they had encountered.
Eighth grader Ananya Pradhan one of the paper’s five editors-in-chief, joined the paper shortly after being elected to the middle school leadership council. In addition to appealing to her love of writing and design, the Gazette offered students a voice on campus. “I believe that the ability for us, the students, to have a creative outlet to express our beliefs, talents, and opinions, is an incredibly valuable opportunity and necessity, as I am a strong supporter of the idea that the student’s voices should be represented and celebrated throughout our community,” she said.
The paper’s five editors each oversee a different section of the paper and advise contributors in addition to planning out meetings and setting deadlines. Editors also contributed to the early design of the paper. “We brainstorm with writers to think of intriguing articles,” said Phoebe Lee, grade 7, another of the Gazette’s editors. “I loved seeing all the writers brainstorm about their ideas together for the future editions. After so many revisions and much coordination, it was such a rewarding feeling to see all the writers’ ideas materialize into the first edition of the Eagle Gazette.”
In future issues, Pradhan said she hopes to see more story ideas pitched by student writers, and Lee said she wanted to see more sections added to the paper, such as one dedicated to learning more about middle school teachers. “In addition, sections like movie or gaming reviews will help to reach a wider audience,” said Lee.
Pradhan found it heartening to see an enthusiasm for writing in so many of her peers. “It always amazes me to see how many enthusiastic peers I have who love writing, and me leading them in growing as writers of the Eagle Gazette has been truly invaluable,” she said, adding that the Gazette is also helping to preserve printed media amidst the prevalence of digital information: “We’re doing our part to also keep the printed news alive, available, and accessible to everyone, even for the younger generations, who will be our future writers and leaders.”