Prospect High School
Each year, the National Scholastic Press Association recognizes excellence in student media with scholastic journalism’s preeminent award, the Pacemaker. Pacemakers are awarded in each category of publication — online, newspaper, yearbook, magazine and broadcast.
Teams of media professionals judge entries based on the following criteria: coverage and content, quality of writing and reporting, leadership, design, photography and graphics.
NSPA contacted Jason Block, adviser of 2016 Online Pacemaker recipient ProspectorNow.com, for a Q&A. ProspectorNow is the online newspaper of Prospect High School in Mount Prospect, Illinois.
NSPA also heard from Caroline Binley, ProspectorNow’s editor-in-chief.
NSPA: Tell us a little bit about the editors and staff of your Pacemaker-winning publication.
Jason Block, adviser: I have five students who poured themselves into improving the website this year, one of whom — Caroline Binley — came over from the print side to really push our online to the same heights as our print newspaper. She was assisted by Molly Mueller, who supervised all of our breaking news coverage, as well as producing all of our live broadcasts of sporting events. Alyssa Duetsch was our online managing editor who coordinated all of the broadcast stories/features, working with Lauren Miller and Erin Schultz on that medium.
From there, we had numerous members of our quote-unquote “print staff” contribute great work to the website this year, which made the biggest difference over past years. It truly was a full staff effort.
NSPA: How did the staff ensure the quality of the publication?
JB: Not only did they pour everything they had into their own stories and the overall look of the site, but they also pushed the print staff to take more pride in their contributions. They institute a new tradition of starting every day with “What’s Happening?”, where everyone chimes in with story ideas for the site.
They also raised the expectations when it comes to the quality of the work that would be posted on the site. No longer was it going to be a “dumping ground” for stories that weren’t good enough to run in print. Instead, they wanted to find stories that could be better told online, and then work with those journalists to make the stories the best they could be.
NSPA: What were the goals going into last year and how did you ensure those goals were met?
Caroline Binley, online editor-in-chief: Our goal had always been to win a Pacemaker. It was something that started out a joke (a “make your deadline or we won’t win the Pacemaker!” kind of empty threat), but as the year went by it became more and more of a possibility, and then an actual reality. That transition from far-off dream to earned award was absolutely amazing.
Our more concrete goal for the year was to make the website equal to our print publication, which had much more critical recognition and student support. We did this by redesigning the site, laying out new standards for acceptable posts and holding ourselves accountable to the same deadlines as our print staff did. These changes resulted in a better-looking site with incredible content for readers.
NSPA: Is there any one issue, story or package that stood out during the year?
JB: Not really one, but I think our best work is our broadcast stories, like Alyssa’s on the student band “Currently Peaking,” where she also included a timeline below the story itself.
I also really liked what Caroline did to document the Italian Club’s exchange trip to Verona this spring. She wrote an amazing column, along with producing a great video story.
Caroline also wrote a very important editorial for the site the day after a student’s father was arrested on charges of child pornography.
NSPA: Tell us about a hardship or obstacle you felt your staff overcame:
JB: The biggest obstacle by far is that a great majority of our overall journalism program wants to write for print rather than online. They had to overcome the mentality that print is more respected, both among our staff and the school community at large.
They also worked with a very small group of full-time online staffers as compared to some schools that are web-only. They really only had five people working on the site as their primary responsibility. Everyone else kind of helped out with online in their spare time.
CB: The toughest moment last year was once we revamped the site, posted some amazing stories and realized we weren’t getting any increased readership. However, we powered through and started using social media more to promote our work.
NSPA: Tell us about a moment you will remember most about this staff.
JB: My online editors are incredibly passionate about what they do, as they made it their mission this year to get the website up to the same very high standards as our print publication. They are constantly pushing to be innovative in their storytelling techniques, as well as with the interface of the site itself.
They just took so much pride in everything we posted to the site, which was a new attitude for our publication.
CB: This summer, I don’t think any of us wanted to work on the newspaper; it was finally our time off, and we really wanted to keep it that way. However, it was the online staff’s dream to come back to school in August with a completely revamped site. So every Saturday for months, our online executive board met and worked on the site. They were lazy meetings — we wore PJs to most of them — and more than a little forced, but we did it nonetheless because that’s what the site needed.
Those meetings kind of encapsulate how I remember our online staff: even when making changes was hard or inconvenient, we had a pride for the site that superseded our desires to hang out with friends or roll back in bed.
NSPA: What does the Pacemaker mean to you and your staff?
JB: It truly does mean validation for all of the hard work the students did not only this year, but in the years leading up to this award. We have had many ups and downs with web journalism — more downs, truthfully — and at times students asked if it was worth their effort to produce stories for the site. This lets everyone know — both in our classroom and in the school — that our website is not only a great source for Prospect news, but also that it is nationally recognized as being every bit as good as our print newspaper.
Hopefully going into the future, I will have more students come to me interested in doing online journalism because of this recognition — our website is finally a destination for great journalists.
CB: The Pacemaker means validation. It means every time I stayed up too late or worked too hard or — God forbid — held another staff meeting about Twitter, I wasn’t as crazy as I seemed. It means every action I took this year was for the right reason and more importantly got the right results. I would have been proud of my site and my staff no matter what, but the Pacemaker means we weren’t just good enough for our own standards; it means we were good enough for the nation’s —if that’s not a tad too dramatic.