Students bring home numerous awards after CSUN write-offs

Cristina Jercan
October 31, 2016

Photo by Adriana Chavira Newspaper students attended CSUN's annual write-offs and received four awards.
Photo by Adriana Chavira
The Pearl Post staff members attended CSUN’s annual write-offs and received four awards earlier this month.

 

Saturday morning is usually a time for waking up late, eating cereal and watching TV. However, Saturday Oct. 22 was a day of write-offs, new experiences and a gained  new appreciation for journalism.

The annual CSUN Journalism Day kicked off with an assembly where the students participating in the event were talked to by important speakers such as Kyle Finck, the head of High School Insider. Then the time had come for the most intense part of the entire morning: the write-off competition.

All of the write-offs followed the typical model of a press conference followed by almost an hour of writing, except for the opinion write off.

For opinion writers this year consisted of forming groups of five students and submitting spoken pieces for HS Insider’s “Message to the Next President.”

After students finished their write-off competitions, they attended the different workshops being held. The workshops included presentations from journalists including Adolfo Flores from Buzzfeed, who talked about covering Latino issues and Marqueeda LaStar, the community manager from BlackGirlNeeds, who talked about diversity.

Once everyone was finished with the Subway sandwich lunch provided, it was time to announce the winners of each of the write-off categories. Staff writer Alice Curran won third place in News writing, Steven Guzman received honorable mention for the Social Media category, opinion editor Cristina Jercan won first place in the opinion category and photographer Richard Mendiola got honorable mention for Photojournalism.

Twitter: @cristanabanana

Watch Jercan’s first place video and check out Guzman’s social media post that recieved an honroable mention here: