Students make front-page news

(From left), Jack Collinson, Leah Wilks, Emily Coyle and Joel Cattell display their winning page. Photo / Richard Robinson

Budding classroom Clark Kents found there was stress in chasing headlines and keeping to deadlines when they put together a newspaper front page.

This year's Newspapers in Education's Design a Front Page competition received 218 entries from primary and intermediate schools around New Zealand.

Becky Hare, who manages the programme, said it developed children's writing skills and turned them into news readers, writers and gatherers.

The best front pages received awards at a ceremony at Auckland Zoo yesterday.

A team from Hauraki School, who had produced a page they called Waitemata Weekly, won the Year 5 and 6 category.

Jack Collinson, Joel Cattell, Leah Wilks and Emily Coyle said they found they had to use strong pictures and focused writing to tell their stories. They said it was stressful putting everything together in time.

Emily, 10 said she found it "really difficult" to take the lead photo, which was of triplet babies and their big brother, because they kept crying at different times.

Judges said the headlines captured the point of the stories and the emotion in the lead photograph could have appeared in any newspaper.

Ellie Vink, Rita Beamer, Naya Dobbeleers and Kayla Palmer from Glen Eden Intermediate won first prize in the Year 7 and 8 age group for their Waitakere Weekly page.

The girls said they had spent a lot of their own time on the project and worked madly to complete it by deadline.

Their teacher Jessica Tibbetts said the exercise had improved the children's writing skills as it gave them "real context to work within and real purpose".

Judges said the pupils had gathered real newsworthy stories that affected the local community, with strong headlines and thorough editorial investigation.

APN, through its nine daily newspapers, has run the competition for three years. Ten national prizes of $1000 are awarded to the five best entrants in each category.