WSPN shined under the blazing Phoenix sun last week, picking up its second consecutive Pacemaker Award from the National Student Press Association (NSPA) on Saturday, April 18th. Six Wayland students and two teachers were on hand to receive the honor in front of a crowd of thousands of fellow student journalists in the Phoenix Convention Center.

The Pacemaker Award is NSPA’s highest honor for student publications. Fifteen high school websites were nominated this year for the Online Pacemaker and judged on design, navigation, writing/editing, graphics and interactivity. The awards are presented each year at the JEA/NSPA Spring National High School Journalism Convention, which took place this year in downtown Phoenix. Aside from online journalism, Pacemakers are also given to high school newspapers, yearbooks and magazines.

WSPN faced stiff competition from both newcomers and multi-year nominees including The Paly Voice (Palo Alto HS, Palo Alto, Calif.), The Feather (Fresno Christian HS, Fresno, Calif.) and The Gargoyle (University Laboratory HS, Urbana, Ill.). In the end, seven of the fifteen hopeful websites went home with plaques in their hands. Between this year and the last, WSPN is the only repeat winner, proving that the field of online journalism is growing at an exponential rate.

“At first, it felt as if we weren’t going to be called, because a few other schools were called first,” explained journalism student Sasha Pansovoy, of the awards ceremony. Pansovoy attended the convention with five other students: Robin Kim, David Ryan, Jennifer Adler, Alie Perkus and Melanie Wang. WSPN’s teacher-advisers, Janet Karman and Mary Barber, also made the trip. Pansovoy said, “Once our name was announced, I was absolutely ecstatic.”

According to Robin Kim, WSPN’s editor-in-chief, Web architect, and founder, the Pacemaker represents “a culmination of every WSPN member’s hard work, time and effort.”

Founded in 2007, WSPN has been in operation just over two years. In this time, the site has received two Pacemaker awards, a Gold Crown award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, and a nomination for an international Webby award honoring excellence on the Internet. However, the challenge now is to keep up these successes. As junior editor Liz Doyon explained, “what we want to do now is keep it going, get more members, add a little more of Wayland to it every day, and continue to make a site that people want to look at.”

NSPA has been working on its scoring guidelines for 2010’s Online Pacemaker contest in an effort to raise the standards of high school online journalism. These guidelines include an emphasis on “new media” such as slideshows, soundshows, podcasts, interactive polls and maps, and video. When it comes to handling this new technology, staff members know that they have much to work on in the upcoming year.

While in Phoenix, students and teachers were also able to attend two days’ worth of journalism workshops. Run by journalism teachers, professors and members of the professional media, these workshops focused on topics ranging from TV broadcasting to the logistics of newspaper layouts to student First Amendment rights. They provided a chance for WSPN advisers and members to learn more about their craft, as well as to see the impact other high school students have been able to make with their publications.

“One of the main things I took away from this convention was how powerful this forum can be for our school,” said Ms. Karman. “I think we can get to the heavier stories, the meatier stories, not only student activities but what students are thinking about and what they’re dealing with. We can tell the stories no one else can tell, the stories of this school’s students. I’m excited about the possibilities here.”