Judge’s Comments

Cheryl Pontius, judge • Division 3
Judge’s edited issue: Vol. 49 Issue 7

“Consistently good high school newspaper that improves year to year. Strong writing works with strong design to produce publication that I’m sure is widely read by not only the students, but by administrators, parents and even business owners.”

Positive comments:
• Good leads that pull reader in

• Good writing in all stories with good sources and variety of quotes (students, admin., parents)

• Excellent editing

• Good packaging that includes a little bit of everything (By the Numbers, Student Photo Poll, History Chart)

• Nice to see a tie-in of a news story to the editorial

• Teasers nicely done

• Good to see source given in graphics

• Good action photos – watch using redundant photos. Just be sure if you run a photo large that it warrants the size.

• Interesting, information 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 (not in issue reviewed, but in other submitted issues)

• Great mix of stories – in features, news and sports. You cover the school well and write to your school audience.

• Enjoyed the calendar – (liked the name “Lifelines). Good idea to add the final exam schedule and the second semester lunch schedule in cutout form.

• Editorials are well researched and offer the problem and solution

• Good mix of letters to the editor

• Inside pages well designed, clean

• Good use of color

Constructive criticism comments:
• Instead of seeing the date and volume number so large on nameplate, I’d rather see school’s name and address

• While the front-page package on One School under God? was a nice one, is this an issue that deserves the entire front page, an A2 story, a B2 story, an editorial/cartoon, and 3 columns? That’s a lot of space devoted to one issue.

• Pages tend to run gray – try using subheads, pull quotes to break that up

• Lots of Is in columns on opinion pages – even though this is an opinion page, try to limit use of personal pronouns

• Headshots need to be consistent in size. Also, make faces larger in headshots. On Page 10, Katie Clancy photo is good size.

• Cutlines – increase type size – these are very hard to read.

• Info boxes, some graphics, cartoons are too large

• Try to crop photos so image has more impact. Also, work with your printer on photo tones/reproduction quality.

• On movie photos, please give photo credit (i.e.,. courtesy of …)

• While I like On the Edge Entertainment where you list a lot of club activities, I would prefer to see more articles about those clubs and what they’re doing instead of all the movie reviews. Maybe limit the number of reviews and add in student-related features.

• I suggest moving your corrections to your opinion pages or to page A2