Students in yearbook, news staff, commercial photography and video productions won an All-Ohio yearbook rating, a gold rating for the news magazine and the news website, eight superiors, 26 excellents, 44 honorable mentions at the Ohio Scholastic Media Association State Conference on April 24.
Students from GlenOak High School news staff and yearbook classes attended the Conference at Kent State University.
During the conference, students attended sessions dealing with media ethics, podcasting, social media, writing, law and ethics, broadcasting, story idea creation and many more. Adviser Angela Spano led three sessions throughout the workshop.
After the sessions, students attended the awards ceremony, where 82 GlenOak media students won awards for writing, photography, broadcasting, art and design.
Spano makes sure her students are prepared and ready for OSMA and was happy with the results.
“I am highly critical of my students because I see everything that is wrong, so I do think I am probably hard on them,” Spano said.
Spano didn’t expect so many awards and went in not thinking they were going to win much. She was very pleased with the end results.
“I really have to keep in mind that judging is subjective; it is just someone’s opinion on our work. It is probably more important that we have over 1000 people come to our website every week, and we have over 300,000 hits on our social media this year, than winning awards. Those last numbers show we are serving our community,” Spano said.
She tries to keep in mind that she should be focusing on what her students need to see in their high school news website and magazine rather than the judging analytics.
“It is nice to win awards, and I am so proud of everyone’s hard work this year, but I also want to make sure our student population is getting quality stories that reflect our student body,” Spano said.
OSMA’s spring conference is mainly about awards, but there is also other activities that make OSMA a memorable experience
“I think it is always great to get off campus for the day to go do something fun and also educational,” Spano said.
Senior and editor-in-chief Emily Hallaman has attended the OSMA State Conference for three years.
“We had so much fun. It was fun as a senior for the last time. Me and my best friends were there, we had fun during the day of competitions this year, which was different. We had fun of course, during the awards and in the classes too,” Hallaman said.
Hallaman thinks getting a double gold this year after everything the staff has gone through was super rewarding.
“It showed that even though hard things, you can still totally have good stuff happen in the end,” Hallaman said.
Hallaman is proud of the staff and happy for the staff members who got superior awards.
“We had seven people get superiors, which I don’t think we have ever had that many, even though I did not get one. I am still super happy for the people that did,” Hallaman said.
At the end of the day, Spano said OSMA was exciting. She loved seeing all the staff members put so much work into their stories and get recognized for their work.
Overall, I am always pushing people to be better. I think realizing you are one of the best ones in the state of Ohio is nice. I think it is just validation that we are doing pretty well. Overall, we have great media programs that students should be getting involved in,” Spano said.
