* Competition requirements
* How to submit the material
* Supporting material for submission
* Young writer of the year nominations
* Your Editorial team
* Make it newsy
* Press tour
* Further resources


COMPETITION REQUIREMENTS

The competition requires students to fill two Herald pages with news stories, photographs, an editorial opinion and accompanying cartoon, masthead and advertisement designed for the competition sponsor the Newcastle Permanent Building Society.

Page 1:
Masthead: supply a catchy name for your newspaper and a separate jpg image of your crest that is at least 300kB.
Story 1: a 250-word story accompanied by a square photograph.
Story 2: a 350-word lead story accompanied by a horizontal photograph.
Story 3: a 200-word story accompanied by a horizontal photograph.

Page 2:
Story 4: a 450-word editorial, accompanied by an editorial cartoon.
Story 5: a 250-word page lead story, accompanied by a horizontal photograph.
Story 6: a 150-word story, accompanied by horizontal photograph.
Story 7: a 250-word story. No photograph.

Advertisement: A student-designed advertisement for the Newcastle Permanent Building Society based on one of three roster-allocated themes of financial awareness, literacy or the society's Here For Good theme, including an image that identifies the building society in the advertisement.

Each school will be allocated a publication date, first and second draft due dates, advertising theme and a Tuesday date for its excursion to the press at Beresfield.
A roster of those dates will be posted on The Herald's school newspaper website.
Material should be sent to The Co-ordinator, The Herald and Newcastle Permanent Building Society School Newspaper Competition, Richard French, PO Box 510, Newcastle, 2300, or hand-delivered to 28 Bolton Street, Newcastle, during Monday to Friday office hours.

HOW TO SUBMIT THE MATERIAL

Although it is preferable to send material in by email on computer disks, parts of the submission, particularly stories and pictures, can also be sent via email to rfrench@theherald.com.au
But to ensure the best results, it is suggested you send material in on disks with dummy layout sheets, checklist, nomination for young writer/sand whether your school can attend the press tour.
The following material must be received:
- Layout Sheets (which can be printed off the website) that clearly denote which story/picture is designated for which space.
- Submission checklist (which can be printed off the website) detailing all components required, whether you wish to nominate a young writer/s for the individual awards and whether your school can bring up to 15 students and at least two adults on the press tour.
- Stories as both printouts, including suggested headlines, photo captions and authors' and photographers' names, and as text-only documents labelled 1 to 7 on a disk.
- The five photographs should be colour photo-quality prints or colour pictures saved in jpg format. It is vital they are between 800 x 600 and 1280 x 1024 pixels and at least 300kB and NOT placed inside word or other documents. They should be put on a disk as separate jpg images labelled 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 to match the stories.
Please include credit line only if a student took the photograph.
- Editorial cartoon and building society advertisements should be black-and-white line drawings, ensuring the illustration and words are dark, legible and big enough to be reproduced clearly. It is essential they are drawn within the templates from the resources website and are mailed as hard copy, not scanned and emailed, and that co-ordinating teachers keep copies of them.
Please ensure you send only one editorial cartoon BUT three alternative advertisements so the society can choose one it likes best.
Entry to The Herald's School Newspaper Competition is free.
For further information about the competition
or this website, please contact The Herald School Newspapers Competition co-ordinator Richard French at rfrench@theherald.com.au or by telephoning 4979-5973.

SUPPORTING MATERIAL FOR SUBMISSION

To ensure the best results for your entry, co-ordinating teachers are asked to download from the resources section of this website the cover sheet checklist, dummy layouts and editorial illustration and advertisement templates.

Cover sheet checklist:
- allows co-ordinating teachers to check off each element of their entry and also contains spaces to nominate a young writer of the year and to RSVP to the invitation to visit the printing press at Beresfield on the Tuesday in the week when a school's entry is published.

Layouts: for the two pages schools compile for the competition are standardised and the dummy layouts sheets on this website are only a guide.
They should be sent with the material with suggested headings and names of student authors and photographers pencilled in to help the school newspaper competition co-ordinator match the submitted stories and photographs to where they should go on each page.

Editorial illustration and advertisement templates:
- should be downloaded for students to draw the cartoon that accompanies the editorial and the advertisement for the Newcastle Permanent Building Society.
It is suggested that drawings be done in very dark pencil or black pen, ensuring that all words and images are sufficiently dark and legible enough to allow electronic reproduction at the same size they will appear in the newspaper.
Although it should be avoided if possible, if electronically scanning in the illustrations to email them, please ensure they are scanned in at a high enough resolution and size to be converted into a clear electronic reproduction.

YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR NOMINATIONS:

Co-ordinating teachers are encouraged to submit at the top of the checklist the name of one or two students who have written a story or editorial opinion that the teacher can attest is entirely that student's own work.
To ensure that the Young Writers individual award can be judged fairly, it is suggested that co-ordinating teachers nominate a student or students who have a sole byline on a news story or editorial opinion.

YOUR EDITORIAL TEAM:

- While schools are welcome to assign a group of students of any age, year group or size to compile the material, the following are some suggestions on how to make your job as the co-ordinating teacher a little easier.
- a group of 15 students, the number allowed under insurance conditions to make the excursion to the printing press, is ideal as it allows all the students to play a role in gathering the material, writing the stories, taking the photographs and drawing the illustrations, avoiding the problem of multiple bylines that often fill up to six to eight lines of a story.
- for primary entries, it is suggested that students no younger than Year 4 be involved and that the group involve some Year 6 students to help guide the younger participants.
- for high school entries, students of any age or year group can be involved, keeping in mind the extra commitments Years 10 and 12 often face in one of their most important school years.
Recently some schools using lower-year students have used a Year 11 or 12 student previously involved in the competition as an editor to ease the burden on the co-ordinating teacher and to support the younger students.
- it is hoped that, apart from reasonable teacher guidance, that students largely write the stories, take the photographs and draw the illustrations themselves.

MAKE IT NEWSY:

- In-house school news can be both informative and entertaining but the competition's judging criteria are based on the requirement that each element of the entry meet certain guidelines which can be found in the resources and curriculum information on this website that apply to real newspaper journalists, artists, photographers and editors working on a major daily newspaper.
While stories and photographs about issues within or related only to your school can be newsworthy, co-ordinators and students should keep in mind that they are reporting to an audience of up to 200,000 readers who will be more interested in stories about issues that, while affecting your school, are also of interest to a wider audience.

PRESS TOUR

- Entry to the competition comes with an opportunity for up to 15 students and at least 2 adults to visit Fairfax Regional Printers at Beresfield.
The tours, at which all visitors must wear fully enclosed footwear, are held on the Tuesday in the week of each school's newspaper publication at set times schools will be allocated on the publication roster.
Two free weekly community newspapers, Fairfax Media's The Star and Newcastle Jets football team owner Con Constantine's The Post, are printed at Beresfield on Tuesdays, ensuring that students get an opportunity to see a modern printing press
producing up to 35,000 copies of a newspaper per hour.
It includes an overview of the press from an upstairs viewing area, visits to the ink and paper stores, an explanation of how printers manage quality from a central, computer-controlled operations room, how printing plates are made using computer-to-plate technology, the operation of the mail and insert areas and an explanation of Fairfax Media's complete electronic page make-up system, Cyber Graphics.

FURTHER RESOURCES *

- The Herald/Newcastle Permanent Building Society School Newspaper Competition can now be undertaken as part of a curriculum unit written by former competition co-ordinator Eve Nesmith and education experts from the state, Catholic and independent systems.
Although it is not a requirement of the competition, the preparation for submitting an entry can be part of a 10-week integrated unit of work for stage three students.
The PDF documents in the Resources section of this website contain Making the News, including learning about newspapers, putting together an editorial team and producing an entry for the competition.
Also under the Resources section of the website is a Resource Booklet, which contains a competition overview; marking rubrics; information on Fairfax Regional Printers at Beresfield; how to submit the entry; curriculum links; a basic look at how a newspaper operates; and classroom exercises on news reporting, photography, advertising, cartooning and editorial writing.

*N.B. The Resources documents on this website also contain six very important pages that co-ordinating teachers should print for use in submitting the entry.
They include an entry form, cover sheet checklist, two pages of dummy layouts and templates for the editorial illustration and advertisements.