The Newspaper staff attended the Tom Bigler Conference at Wilkes University on April 26.
The conference was also attended by other aspiring high school journalism groups. Each student was given a folder that contained the planned out schedule for the day, a lunch pass and a copy of Wilkes University’s newspaper, The Beacon.
Before attending the conference students had to register and pick the sessions they wanted to participate in, and then the staff at Wilkes placed students in a variety of the different sessions.
These sessions contained professionals in different umbrellas of journalism careers that spoke to the selected students, these sessions included people who worked for local news stations, The Scranton Wilkes Barre Railriders, and two Emmy Award winning photojournalists.
They all shared their expertise and experiences on how to succeed in their fields. After these first sessions ended, there were award ceremonies.
The journalism advisers submitted different students’ works in different categories including, news story, feature story, opinion and editorial, sports article, news/feature photo, sports photo, page layout and design, podcast and overall best issue. Dv had winners in multiple categories, Michael Helt for news story, Emma Ciancio for opinion/ editorial, Francesca Antonecchia for sports photo and Kaylee Kurcon for page layout and design.
After the awards ceremony, students participated in one of the workshops in the Communications Building. The workshops included the radio station, TV station, speech and debate, pr program and their beacon office.
Students were able to try out the equipment and have a taste of what they are interested in, then students were able to eat lunch in the cafeteria with other students.