So the CHSPA Summer Adviser Workshop has grown to five days on the campus of CSU in Fort Collins. You can download information on the July 16–20 workshop here, and can download the registration form (which can be emailed in, along with credit card information) here.

The expanded workshop promises a combination of hands-on skill training, development of adviser philosophy, and unit and lesson construction. Instructors Karen Wagner, Adam Dawkins and Jack Kennedy have developed the workshop to concentrate on teaching reporting and writing, learning the basics of InDesign and Photoshop, incorporating WordPress into your program (with a “live” site to practice on), along with plenty of discussion on press law and ethics, editorial policies and staff handbooks, and class organization and management.

It will be the best five days of professional growth you can find, and it’s only $250. Find out much more by contacting Jack Kennedy at jpkjournalism@gmail.com or Karen Wagner at kwags4@gmail.com, and watch for additional information on this website. Deadline to register is July 1.

You may also want to browse through the CU website for more information.

CHSPA is eager to support all forms of journalism education in Colorado, from middle school through university level.

Take your research, reporting and storytelling to a new level with instruction and guidance from the award-winning journalists of I-News.

Selected applicants will get the chance to be an investigative journalist for the week of July 9–13. Each will experience how to investigate and produce multimedia reports with guidance from some of the best in the business.

The deadline to apply is June 1.

To apply online or learn more, visit the I-News website (and be sure to watch the video to get an inside look!): http://bit.ly/DigForTruthAtCU

A special offering this year is a FREE curriculum writing workshop, bringing together advisers to study how the Colorado ELA standards, the Common Core, and the P21 project all can be incorporated into journalism/media curricula, as well as concentrated time to write curriculum that can be used this fall. It’s all designed to demonstrate how journalism/media education can be a school’s best way to build Common Core skills in our students.

The comprehensive registration form can be found here, and needs to be submitted even if the only workshop you want is the free curriculum workshop for advisers.

You can confirm all your school awards, and see who else placed in our annual individual contests, by downloading the master awards Excel spreadsheet. This is the document from which all names were derived, and the cells have not been expanded in size. But click on a cell and you will see all the names connected with each award category.

There were individual contests in newspaper/newsmagazine, yearbook and video broadcast. We hope to add digital online next year as a contest with multiple categories. We included a middle school yearbook division for the very first time this year. Our hope is that all our member schools will consider entering their best student work in these contests next March. Our 2013 contest will be better than ever, with input from our members.

So if you have ideas to improve our contests, please share by sending them to jpkjournalism@gmail.com.

We hope to create a reader-friendly resource which combines samples of award-winning work, with our judges’ comments and support materials for the classroom — our goal is to have those available by mid-July.

Congratulations to all our winners!

NSPA National Pacemaker Award
Eques yearbook – Ponderosa HS, Anastasia Harrison, adviser

NSPA Best of Show awards
Yearbooks 225–274 pages, 5^th place – Westwind, Lewis-Palmer HS
Yearbooks 275–324 pages, 7^th place – Summit, Smoky Hill HS
Newsmagazine, 4^th place – Eagle Eye, Mountain Vista HS
Junior High Yearbook, 1^st place – Eagle Eye View, Sierra MS
Junior High Yearbook, 2^nd place – The Prowl, Powell MS

JEA National Write-offs
Superior, Newsmagazine Layout – Levi Dillon, Grandview HS
Excellent, Feature Writing – Emily Harmon, Grandview HS
Excellent, Advertising – Sarah Sturch, Grandview HS
Honorable Mention, News Writing – Andew Smalley, Fort Collins HS
Honorable Mention, Feature Writing – Taylor Blatchford, Mountain Vista HS
Honorable Mention, Sports Writing – David Andrews, Monarch HS
Honorable Mention, Editorial Cartooning – Julis Shuster, Grandview HS
Honorable Mention, Yearbook Student Life Photography – Cody Enboden, Mountain Vista HS
Honorable Mention, First Year Photographer – Sammy Linares, Mountain Vista HS

This is a great way for students to learn more about Student Media at CSU and to make some money while discovering their interests.

March 1 - All entries for our second spring individual award competition, the Best of Colorado Awards, must be uploaded prior to April 1, 2012. This is an all-electronic contest, with no mailing required (though there is an option to mail DVDs or CDs for video broadcast entries only). Judging will be done by a variety of professional and scholastic journalists from across the nation, awards will be given by enrollment classifications (3A, 4A, 5A) and results will arrive at each school in the form of award certificates in early May.

We hope the timely arrival of these certificates will lead to celebrations of individual student achievement during end-of-year media awards ceremonies, Quill and Scroll ceremonies, or school awards presentations. After all, there has been some terrific work done this year among Colorado scholastic journalists.

School media may enter as many or as few of the contest categories as desired, but may only enter once per category. Only current CHSPA member media may enter this contest, and there are no additional fees for members to take advantage of this competition. If a school medium is not a current member, renewing or starting a membership is the first step in entering this competition, as only members will be sent the login and password for the CHSPA contest site (where all entries will be uploaded).

Step-by-step instructions can be found here:
1. General instructions and background on the contests for all media.
2. The list of contest categories for yearbook, categories for newspaper, and categories for video broadcast.
3. Specific instructions for yearbook entries and specific instructions for newspaper entries. Video entry instructions are sent directly to member video broadcast media advisers.
IMPORTANT: please export all entries as PDFs in SMALLEST FILE SIZE format, which will speed uploads and downloads — procedures are in the instructions for specific media.
4. Fill in the entry form (in Microsoft Word format) for newspaper/newsmagazine, for yearbook, or for video broadcast. Then be sure to upload that Word document when you upload your contest entries to the contest website (www.chspacontests.org)

All current members will receive an email (through the adviser) with login and password for accessing the contest site not later than March 10. That same email will include a Word document for advisers to fill in that will contain student names, etc. The actual uploading of contest submissions takes very little time, and we recommend that advisers only handle this. Preparing entries is more labor-intensive, requiring staffs to sort through material from the current school year, choose their best efforts, and create copies of those pages or spreads in a contest folder.

The drop dead deadline is that all submissions must be uploaded to the contest site by midnight, March 31, along with the Word document which functions as the medium’s official entry form. All award certificates are generated from these forms, so please double check for accuracy.

March is a busy month, with all sorts of deadlines, TCAP, spring break, etc., but we hope advisers and staffs will take a few precious minutes to gather entries and be part of this competition. Last May nearly 1,400 certificates were awarded to Colorado student journalists.

Feb. 28, 2012 -

The crowd of over 200 journalists and legislators had the chance to hear the story of the struggle to publish a simple cause of death in a feature story on an Overland student last spring, and how things turned out well when CHSPA, the ACLU and professional media leaders combined to convince Overland administrators to change their position.

Jack Kennedy, CHSPA executive director, had nominated the two young women for the award, and made the presentation at the luncheon on behalf of CPA. You can read his remarks here.

This year, due to one of the scheduled speakers being unable to attend due to legislation on the state senate floor, the contest prompt became: Write a news feature for an audience of Colorado high school journalists who were unable to attend our Feb. 10 event, and focus on what the experience was like and the kinds of things participants learned. 

A total of 67 students from 19 schools participated in CHPC, and there were also 19 advisers in attendance. Those attendance numbers were among the all-time best for this event, which began in 1982. It was originally called “Governor’s Day Press Conference,” though the tradition of having the governor answer questions for 45 minutes was broken in the late 1990s — hence the name change. Speaker of the House Frank McNulty and Senate President Brandon Shaffer were our scheduled participants, for the second time.

Twenty-eight news features were submitted after the 90 minutes were up. The news features were judged by an out-of-state professional.

There were also four teams of video broadcast reporters, and they had until the following Wednesday to send the links to their 3-minute maximum reports to CHSPA. Broadcast students were encouraged to conduct interviews, gather footage in and around the Capitol, etc., during the 90 minutes. They then did their editing back at school. Two teams submitted their work, and they were judged by a professional journalist.

News Feature Writing

1st place
Legend HS — Tyffani Hoff & McKenna Weech

2nd place
Arapahoe HS — Emerald O’Brien & Madi Bates

3rd place
Mountain Vista HS — Macy Morgan & Mike Collins

Honorable mentions:
Valor Christian HS — Chase Hoven & Elisabeth Armstrong
Legacy HS — Sydney Kochevar, Ashley Montoya & Hannah Carpenter
Rock Canyon HS — Michael Shapiro & Kaitlin Jarrell

The judge wrote: The winning entries had a central theme, rather than just recounting a series of events. They started with a lede that drew in the reader, and stressed one or two main events that the intended audience (other high school journalists) would be likely to find interesting or learn from.

Video programs

1st place
Rocky Mountain HS — Alex Creighton & Lauren Binder

2nd place
Englewood HS — Tyler Castle & Emily Griego