News
Chippewa staff earns awards aplenty
Matthew Semisch
04/14/2015
High school students wise enough to get involved in extracurricular activities get pulled in many directions. The more involved the students are, the further they’re stretched.
The 10-member staff of the Chippewa, Bottineau High School’s student newspaper, knows that all too well. They also know, though, that hard work and dedication pay off, just as it did for them recently at the North Dakota state newspaper award ceremony.
The Chippewa won 25 awards at the Northern Interscholastic Press Association (NIPA) convention on March 28 at West Fargo High School. NIPA is a statewide school media organization tied to the school of communication at the University of North Dakota.
Twenty-four individual awards came the Chippewa staff’s way at the ceremony. Even better, the Chippewa also picked up first place in NIPA’s best overall design category for papers whose schools’ populations are at 750 students or fewer.
The Chippewa won the best overall newspaper category by virtue of finishing first in the writing and editing, graphic presentation and business operations categories.
Ashleigh Jerde, one of six seniors on staff for this school year, won seven of the paper’s 23 individual awards. Fellow seniors Laura Ellen Brandjord (five awards), Erin Severson (four), Jared Munson, Jair Peltier and Madison Klebe (one each) were also honored for pieces they submitted.
Of the six individual first-place awards the Chippewa staff earned, Jerde and freshman Emmalie Munson won two apiece while Severson and Brandjord both won one.
In all, it was an extraordinary haul for a small-town student paper. What makes it even more impressive is that the Chippewa has only been part of a course-credit class for less than two years.
The Chippewa used to be a club activity for BHS students before 2013, when the school turned it into a class to be led by high school English teacher Jackie Bullinger,
Bullinger trains her students for the first month of the fall semester before that year’s first monthly edition of the paper comes out. Last fall’s first edition came out in October, and the final paper of the school year will be released on May 18.
The paper is printed at North Central Printing, the Rugby-based company that also prints the Bottineau Courant. The April edition was printed on Monday before being distributed at school and at select locations around Bottineau today.
Immediately after this month’s paper was printed, the Chippewa staff does what it does around this time every month: It gets right back to work.
“As soon as the paper is published, we have what we call a breakfast meeting where we usually have breakfast in here and brainstorm articles for the next paper,” Bullinger said. “We come up with ideas for what’s coming up at the school, and everybody’s involved in different groups so we generally know what’s going to be happening.
“From there, it’s just making lists and people grabbing who wants to do what.”
Few things are static on the staff in terms of who does what. Everyone on the staff gets experience working on all aspects of the bigger job at hand.
Much of what the staff learns in class will help them going forward, even outside of journalism. Jerde will attend Minnesota State University-Moorhead in the fall and study graphic design, and writing regularly and working with Adobe’s InDesign design program for the Chippewa have bolstered her skill set.
“Working in InDesign is going to help me a lot with the graphic design stuff, and I’ve wanted to do it ever since last year when I took a desktop publishing class and really enjoyed that,” Jerde said, “and I think my writing skills have really improved by taking this class.
Staff members find that their writing style changes for the Chippewa as opposed to how they write in their other language arts classes.
“What I like about journalism is it’s such a different kind of writing,” said Severson, who plans to attend UCLA this fall and has not yet decided on a major field of study. “I’ve done a lot in English classes with essays and personal writing and things like that, but news writing is a lot different.
“Having this way of writing, it’s a good skill to have, and I like how you have to work to be unbiased in it,” she continued. “Not everyone can do news writing right off the bat, but it pays to stick with it.”
On Wednesday, Bullinger and her six seniors will travel to Denver to attend the National High School Journalism Convention. Severson will compete in the convention’s news writing competition, while Jerde will take part in an editorial cartoon event.