THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 8, 1994 TAG: 9407080087
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E11 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARGARET TALEV, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
GOING, GOING, gone are the days when editors prayed daily for a fire or political scandal to fill the school newspaper.
Welcome to a kinder, gentler generation of award-winning high school reporters: Jared Thompson, vegetarian sports editor, and Jennifer Johnson, a co-editor who prefers long copy and first-person narratives to short, hard news stories.
Jared and Jennifer are part of a staff that produced Manteo High School's newspaper, Sound To Sea, recently named the best overall newspaper in the small school category by the N.C. Scholastic Press Association.
What won this year's staff this and 13 additional awards, according to Jennifer, was the ``super-eclectic mix of people'' that interviewed, investigated surveyed, wrote, edited, photographed, cropped, captioned and designed their way through weekends and school nights to meet their deadlines.
This year's Sound To Sea editions included news and feature coverage of high school students who live away from their parents' home, violence at Manteo High, AIDS, teacher profiles, eating disorders and the information superhighway.
But the paper also devoted extensive space to anonymous first-person narratives by students, including one by a recovering drug addict and another by a recovering bulimic.
When teacher Robin Sawyer became the sponsor of Sound To Sea in 1991, she said, the paper needed more quality, creativity, diversity and news focus. She stood before her new staff with an edition from the previous year. Anybody who wanted to produce a publication like that could get up and leave, she told the class. One girl did.
Ethics were discussed, and libel law was taught. The format changed, and the paper expanded. Computer technology improved. So did the paper.
But Sawyer said the lessons and computers could not have won the paper awards without an almost obsessive dedication from the odd mix of staffers.
Newsroom diversity is not a new concept, but in this Outer Banks community, with an economy fueled largely by fishing and tourism, the odds are against finding punk rockers, cheerleaders, conservatives, environmentalists and a churchgoing sponsor who loves auto racing - all working toward one goal.
Sawyer said although she and her students believed they were making changes that helped the paper reach out to more of the school community, she lacked proof until the N.C. Scholastic Press Association awards ceremony held in June in Chapel Hill.
``Awards, to me, validate that you're not only serving your readers, but that you're serving them well,'' she said.
But Jennifer said that, while it felt great to be awarded, she was disturbed that she had to go to a conference run by other journalists to get feedback.
``I don't know how much the paper actually does for the school. I don't know if anybody actually cares,'' she said. ``What's a student newspaper for? It's for the students. But how much do they actually read it?'' by CNB