Sevastopol Student Paper and Yearbook Earn Honors

The Pioneer Chips, Sevastopol’s student newspaper, earned an Honorable Mention award for general excellence from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s Better Newspaper Contest.

Several student’s received individual honors as well: senior Steph Jauquet, first place for sports reporting; junior Riley Spetz, first place in column writing; senior Darcy Johnsrud, second place in general reporting; senior Jena Paul, second place for column writing; and sophomore Christiana Gorchynsky, third place in the general reporting category. Jauquet, Paul, and Johnsrud are editors of the paper.

At the Northeastern Wisconsin Scholastic Press Association Conference at UW-Oshkosh April 21, Sevastopol students took home a total of 33 writing, design, and photography awards. The Pioneer Chips received a red ribbon, with first-place individual awards in the categories of sports news, entertaining feature, sports feature, computer graphics, and photography.

The Pioneer 2009 earned a blue ribbon award, with first places given to best cover, use of computer graphics, index design, and various double-page spreads. Chelsea Orthober, now a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was editor of the book. Earlier in the year, the yearbook received a First Class Award with two Merits of Distinction from the National Scholastic Press Association.

The cover is also featured in Jostens’ nationally distributed Gotcha Covered Look Book, one of only 518 yearbooks selected out of 3,000 submitted from across the country. This is the second year in a row that a Pioneer yearbook was chosen for this distinction.