Schools front up with newspaper designs

Auckland Normal Intermediate shared top honours with this front page.

The winners of the 2010 Design a Front Page of a Newspaper have been announced and seven of the 10 national winners are schools from Auckland.

At the prize-giving held at St Mary's Northcote yesterday, the judges said most of the entries showed a "sophisticated grasp of front-page layout and design concepts".

Nationally, 163 teams, involving 540 students, entered their own A2 front pages in the competition, run by APN Newspapers in Education every year.

St Mary's Northcote and Auckland Normal Intermediate not only won a national title, they also won their regional age categories of Years 5 and 6 and Years 7 and 8 respectively.

"It was all very exciting and a bit overwhelming with the realisation that they won nationally," said Maria Mistleberger, the teacher who helped the St Mary's Northcote team.

On the winning "St Mary's Weekly" team was Joachim Tan, Tadiwanashe Mangeya, Monique Oyagawa and Amanda D'Souza.

"The kids and I appreciated the stress and pressure of a newspaper," Ms Mistleberger said.

"We realised that getting the news was the hard part. We ended up having to lead with a softer story about twins because we have eight sets of twins at our school."

At the beginning of the second term in May, each team was given the entry criteria. These included two or three news stories, an editorial on "Reading: an essential life skill or a dying art?" and their own photos and advertising.

Students were put in groups of four with a teacher in-charge, most of whom had attended a free workshop on the competition in April.

Each of the teams that won national honours received $1000 for their school and individual prize packs for the participating students, and the regional winners got a digital camera.