2025 Innovation Pacemakers
NSPA honors innovation
Two scholastic media programs named Pacemakers
April 25, 2025
SEATTLE — Honoring the nation’s best, the National Scholastic Press Association named two high school student media programs as Innovation Pacemaker winners.
The innovation winners, plus the 2025 Online Pacemaker, 2024 Yearbook Pacemaker and 2024 Literary Arts Magazine Pacemakers winners, were announced during the closing awards ceremony of the JEA/NSPA Spring National High School Journalism Convention, on April 26.
“The Pacemaker is the association’s preeminent award,” Executive Director Laura Widmer said. “NSPA is honored to recognize the best of the best.”
The NSPA Pacemaker, one of the oldest awards for scholastic journalism, has a rich tradition. The association started presenting the prestigious award to high school newspapers soon after the organization was founded in 1921. Throughout the years, yearbooks, magazines, online sites and broadcast programs were added to the competition.
The Innovation Pacemaker is designed to encourage out-of-the-box thinking and reward student media for the courage to take chances to improve service to their customers, readers and communities.
“Student media is rapidly changing and top programs are finding innovative ways to deliver content to their readers while building unified and converged teams,” associate director Gary Lundgren said. “Print is now just one component — there is far more to a successful student media program than publishing the campus newspaper and yearbook.”
2025 Innovation Pacemakers
listed by state
El Estoque
Monta Vista High School
Cupertino, California
Student Leadership: Samika Bhatkar, Ananya Chaudhary, Kathryn Foo, Jami Lim, Alan Tai, Alyssa Yang
Advisers: Vennessa Nava, Julia Satterthwaite
The Standard
The American School in London
London, England
Student Leadership: Sophia Bateman, Oskar Doepke
Adviser: Louisa Avery