My name is Cindy Reves. I am Hawaii’s director for the Journalism Education Association and coordinate the Hawaii Student Journalist of the Year contest. The HiJOY winner competes in the national JEA JOY contest. I also teach Newswriting at McKinley High School and require my students to create a simplified version of a HiJOY portfolio as part of their quarterly grade, with the hope that they will then enter HiJOY their senior year. If you are an adviser or student looking at the HiJOY requirements for the first time, believe me, I know it’s a lot of work. So, in addition to lots of resources I’ve posted on the Hawaii Scholastic Journalism Association website, I want to share how the work done for HiJOY could serve double duty.

McKinley’s student newspaper, The Pinion, joined the National Student Press Association last year primarily because membership to NSPA covers the cost of our issuu subscription. With membership, however, also comes the opportunity to enter many contests. The one I want to highlight in this post is the portfolio contests.

Unlike HiJOY, there is an entry fee for the NSPA portfolio contests, but if your school does want to join NSPA and enter their contests, consider how you can leverage the requirements of NSPA and HiJOY to get the biggest bang for your time and show off all the great journalism work you have done. There is an NSPA Writer of the Year portfolio contest; there is a writer category of the HiJOY portfolio. There are also NSPA portfolio contests for Artist of the Year, Broadcast Journalist of the Year, Designer of the Year, Marketer of the Year, and Multimedia Journalist of the Year; all of these are also optional categories for HiJOY. Hopefully, you get the picture. Here’s a link to the HiJOY rubric.

Here are the NSPA 2024 portfolio winners: https://studentpress.org/nspa/2024-portfolio-of-the-year/