Cape Girardeau, Missouri - Local high school journalists, photographers, and editors just had the chance to experience an event of a lifetime last week at the Southeast Missouri Student Press Association (SEMSPA) workshop. The SEMSPA executives teamed up with Jostens, our local high schools’ yearbook publishers, to create an event that students will remember for the rest of their lifetime.
Multiple Stoddard County schools, including Dexter, Richland, and Puxico, travelled to Cape Girardeau and attended this special workshop on the University of Southeast Missouri campus. Students got great advice from the SEMSPA leaders, photographers, journalists, and editors that have worked in the media field for multiple years. Students got the chance to talk to these great people and got to go to sessions to help further their knowledge with their media classes at school, including yearbook and journalism.
The guest speaker for this event was Aaron Manfull, who travelled all the way from St. Louis to meet with the students late last week. Manfull is a current JEA Digital Media Chair, director of STL Media Now, won the National DJNF Journalism Teacher of the Year Award, and is currently the Francis Howell North Journalism supervisor and business teacher. Manfull was an excellent speaker and gave advice to not only the students, but the teachers and directors as well. Manfull oversaw the publication and designing of Francis Howell North’s yearbooks for multiple years, but his most recent (2011-2012) yearbook just won the title as the best yearbook for both the state level and the national level.
Students and teachers learned so much from Manfull’s presentation and many joined him afterwards for more advice on how to make their yearbooks better. Young yearbook students and journalists also got the opportunity to attend “Breakout Sessions” throughout the workshop. There were a large number of students who attended these breakout sessions and reported back to their teachers eagerly with their new information from their Photo Shop class, photography class, designing class, or journalism class.
Our local students also got the chance to sit down face to face with the Jostens advisors and create the cover of this year’s yearbook.
“It was a great opportunity to see the students excited about it,” Richland’s yearbook adviser Kyle Carter explained. “Jostens sat down at the table with us, we threw our ideas out at them, and they created a phenomenal cover that our Rebels will love when they get their books next August.”
The local high school newspapers and yearbook students are ready to go with their new knowledge. They will be attending more workshops throughout the year to better their writing and photography skills so they can make both their newspapers and yearbooks the best that they can be!
