DP News honored among the best in the nation
for student journalism
Student news program wins several awards,
Including Dos Pueblos High School
First ever first place finish
By Ryan Cruz | April 2, 2023
Every year since Dos Pueblos High School’s student-run news program DP News began competing in the Student Television Network’s annual competition — a national competition and awards show that’s the high school equivalent of the Emmys or Academy Awards — students come with high hopes, but were left for the most part empty-handed. In 16 years in the competition, Dos Pueblos took only three awards.
John Dent, who has helped run the program since its inception in 2004, remembers the familiar feeling each spring when, despite his confidence that the team had done an impressive job for the competition, he had to help his hard-working students cope I disappoint with another one.
“Every year I sit in the room and think, ‘This one is definitely going to make it this year,'” Dent said. “And every year I’m disappointed.”
This year, Dent and Doug Kane, who was hired to take over as DP News’ chief instructor five years ago, took 34 students on the five-day trip to Long Beach, where the kids participated in more than a dozen competitions — news reporting, video editing and filmmaking, testing their skills against more than 2,700 student journalists from across the country.
After a week of team bonding and long hours crammed into hotel suites for video editing, the team gathered for the awards ceremony, where halfway through Dos Pueblos still hadn’t heard their name called.
“I thought it was going to be another one of those years where I’d have to deal with heartbreak,” Dent said.
But then luck changed for the DP News team. The group’s video about the dangers of phone addiction, “Disconnect to Reconnect,” created by Alex Gardiner and Seth Phillips, won fourth place honors for Public Service Announcement.
The team was “ecstatic,” Dent said, but as soon as they sat down, they found themselves winning four of the next five awards, including two third place wins, one second place and the number one spot in the Sports Highlight Edit.
In total, DP News took home five awards in the on-site competitions, along with its daily newscast earning recognition among the top 20 in the nation, and The Goodland Podcast has been named “the second best high school podcast in the country.”
“It was great to get validation for our students,” said Kane, who described the Crazy 8 competition — in which students have eight hours to write, report, shoot and edit video submissions — as “hyper competitive” and dependent on collaboration with each member of the the group.
DP News took third place in the Crazy 8 Documentary competition with “Actions Speak Louder,” a short film that explores the impact of plastics on the environment through interviews with local businesses, scientists and other experts in the field.
Kane said it was a “real collaboration” for the students to go out and grab the stories and interviews in a city they didn’t know and in an extreme time crunch.
“I always say that life is a big group project,” Kane said. “You can’t live alone.”
Both Cain and Dent said the students’ success is indicative of the leadership of a core group of seniors Gabrielle Casselman, Logan Surber and Allison Togami, each of whom played a central role in the program’s daily broadcasts and led the way with team competitions in Long Beach.
Togami, Dent said, is a key figure in the program, as a senior producer who has more experience with these events than any of her classmates. “Without her leadership, we would not have been successful.”
“This year has been just amazing,” said Casselman, who also serves as executive producer of the daily show. He said his favorite moments of the trip to Long Beach were between getting to know his classmates or during the ceremony when the entire group celebrated their victories together.
“It was electric,” said Seth Tedeschi, who teamed with fellow sophomore Jude Cuddy to take first place in Editing Sports Highlights. “I didn’t expect us to win and everyone got up and started cheering. It was so cool — it’s surreal.”
Junior Aidan Myers placed second in the Tell the Story News Editing competition, which involves telling a compelling story using raw interviews and videos. He attributes his success to “Mr. Caines,” which teaches the importance of having a good beginning, middle, and end to any story.
The trio of Jules Steelsmith, Sophia Merritt and Sophia Pixley took third place with a vertically oriented 90-second video package aimed at social media, which the group says is becoming increasingly popular with teenagers who look to their phones for news.
Students competed in over 15 contests at the convention, including other art history entries, infomercial, music video, personal vlog, and movie trailer.
“Producing high-quality content like DP News provides is difficult in any setting, especially in a school,” said Santa Barbara Unified School District Superintendent Hilda Maldonado, “but these students do it every day. We are proud of the quality work they are doing to inform DP students and to see the hard work recognised.’
You can watch the daily editions of DP News online.