Dispatch from CSPA Day 1

Today is the first of three days that I am spending working the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. The annual conference for high school journalists has been going on for 83 years. This year's rendition brought in 4,500 students from 40 states, with attendees coming from as far away as Anchorage, Alaska.

It's a pretty good three-day gig. Free lunch and a few hundred bucks for nine hours work on a day that I was just sitting around. I figured I would just sit around for a couple of days, sit in the back, get ahead on some homework, and be done with it. And that's what I did for the first two session on high school news broadcasts.

But in the second session, I ended up with Ray Westbrook who teaches journalism at a small private school in Dallas called St. Mark's. This was where the creme de la creme of Dallas society--the mayor, a congressional representative, H. Ross Perot, etc.--sent their sons and grandsons.

He started showing off his students' paper, the ReMarker ... and I was floored. Their designs were the strongest that I had ever seen from a high school paper, and beat out a lot of what I had seen from the top-tier of college dailies as well.
Design-wise, they were doing things in print that were normally reserved for top-tier magazines.

For one story on drug culture in a high school--something that no school ever wants published but that they somehow managed to get an administration on board with--they took the poetry of a man who had attempted to commit suicide after losing all his money on crack and booze, laid it over a black and gray two-layered with neat typography background, and had an image of the man worked in there as well. The story itself was well-written (Westbrook taught two sessions--one on design and one on feature writing), and it was just an incredibly slick paper.

Seriously, just look at that front page. On another one about sex ed., they crafted an elegant bird and a bee out of condoms. It was stunning.

I also spent some time with a California paper called the Crossroads which also had a magazine. I can't find any images of it online, but man could they design. There were others I just hope that we can convince some of these guys to come to Columbia.

In any case, I left the day inspired... I really didn't expect that to happen.