Judge’s Comments

Cheryl Pontius, judge • Division 2
Judge’s edited issue: Vol. 89 Issue 5

“Very nice paper with good packaging, good mix of articles. Your staff is not afraid to take on controversy when required. Good strong design. Great reading!”

Positive comments:
• Index/teasers nicely done

• Good Newsline down front page – good way to get more information into the paper

• Good action photos – unfortunately reproduction is not that good – try talking with your printer to work on this problem

• Interesting, informative captions – need to add a direction however to let reader know who is who (i.e., from left)

• Front pages have dominant story/photo and secondary story with art

• Great mix of stories – in features, news and sports. You cover the school well and write to your school audience. Good to see sports stories about hunting, bowling, rifle team, mental attitude award.

• Stories are well written with good leads, good sources

• Excellent editorial on story in previous issue about IHSAA violations and newspaper’s responsibility to report it (story in October issue was really good and great to have the interview with former player)

• Good opinion columns, but would like to see letters to the editor

• Lots of photos, artwork, drop caps, points of entry

• Very nice packages on both self-cutting and ADD. Very complete and well designed. Both packages have good sources in stories. My one concern on the self-cutting package was using the cutout of Lavonne Cook with her column. This package is very serious and the cutout doesn’t really work.

• Good informative cutlines

• Inside pages well designed, clean

Constructive criticism comments:
• Front-page headlines need to be larger – since the front page is your showcase of most important stories, have headlines reflect that importance (particularly your dominant story)

• Make sure each page has dominant story/photo (i.e., Page 6 has no dominant – reader doesn’t know which story is the most important

• While stories have great leads and are well written, watch passive voice – try to write each sentence with an active verb if possible

• Keep photos to top of story

• Work on AP style

• Avoid use of personal pronouns in any article – news, feature, sports, columns

• When you do infographics or provide other facts that aren’t provided by local sources, please provide sources (i.e., in the ADD package, you cite numbers of Americans with ADD/ADHD – who was source of those numbers?)

• Would like to see some reviews – movie, CD, book

• While headlines use active verb, try to liven them up a bit Also try to avoid a two-deck headline spanning the entire page. Use one deck and add a summary deck.