The Southfield Jay won multiple awards in April.
Seniors Imari Pickens and Erin Boateng were national winners in the Quill and Scroll International Writing and Photo contest. Pickens won her award for editorial writing, while Boateng won her award for a photo entitled “Robert Peoples Clangs the Cymbals at Halftime.”
In state competition, The Southfield Jay won its ninth consecutive Spartan Award for outstanding high school journalism. The Spartan Award is the highest honor given to a high school newspaper by the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association (MIPA).
The Southfield Jay is now a contender for the MIPA Hall of Fame. All hall of fame members have won the Spartan Award for 10 years straight.
The writers for The Southfield Jay won numerous individual awards at the MIPA awards conference. All the awards were won in Division II, which is for schools with a population of approximately 1,300 students. Here are some of the awards won by Jay staffers:
• Junior Cory Jackson won first place in the sports feature story category
• Senior Erin Boateng won first place in the Feature photograph category
• Junior Logan Patmon won second place in the Review category
• Senior Tori Thornwell won second place in the Editorial Cartoon category
• Sophomore Michelle Nobles and seniors Lindsey Turner and Erin Boateng won second place as a team in the Photo Story category
Jackson and junior Darian Hayes also won honors in sports writing in the 2009 Detroit Free Press Writing Awards.
Newspaper Editor-in-Chief Vaniece Jenkins said, “The students earned their awards. They wrote beautiful stories, took careful pictures and planned their content well.”