Shine news

It’s March, the days are longer and (whisper it) Spring might be around the corner. Something else is coming soon: our deadline for the Shine Awards 2024, at the beginning of May. If that prospect feels daunting, or makes your students think they might need to abandon a school project that hasn’t quite come together yet, take heart. They might have already nailed it.

So what if the project, like your student team, has many parts? Rather than this being a problem of disparity and competing voices, perhaps it’s a solution, especially at this point in the school calendar.

In January I accepted an invitation from Antony Barton, the Head of English at Putney High, in west London. Putney’s school magazine, ‘A Study in Purple’, has been a consistent entrant in the Shine Awards and the team behind the project wanted to talk about a subject dear to my heart: design.

As Chair, fairness is something that’s really important to me. So, just as we published Liz’s top tips for great journalism a few weeks ago, so I’ve written up the central points I made to the team at Putney High for all Shine Award entrants in the hope this is useful and inspires great design in magazine (print or e-publication) or newspaper entries.

When we’re asked as teenagers, ‘what would you like to be?’ the answers used to be firefighter, spaceman or rocket scientist. These days our heroes are different: when we see reporters at the frontline in war zones, telling us what’s really happening in the most dangerous parts of the world, the answer just might be, ‘journalist’.

But not every journalist wears a hard hat and flack jacket, and this week I’ve been talking to a reporters who’s beat focuses on sports. Uche Amako works on the digital sports desk at The Daily Telegraph and I asked him how he got into his line of work and what was the pivotal moment when he decided to go for it.

This week we’re talking podcasts. It’s a media I am passionate about promoting as (assuming you can borrow someone’s smartphone) it’s totally cost neutral. It’s also the most community-oriented and easily distributed of all the categories we cover at the Shine Awards.

Podcasting may seem daunting at first, but with podcasts taking over the world we’re here to show you how easy they can be. Not only are they simple, they’re a great way to encourage your students to diversify their ideas and create something exciting.

This week we are offering a set of fantastic tips for young podcasters from Luke Chapman, our resident social media expert who judges the category for us each summer. Luke covers all aspects of podcasting from figuring out where to begin, to how to edit… and even ensure it’s something that can be continued by students next year.

Invariably students know what they want to write about – and it’s fiercely important to them. Yet, when it comes to a school newspaper or magazine, what may be less clear is how they write about it.

Some advice from a contemporary might be helpful. George Thornicroft, who won a Shine School Media Award for his writing back in 2017, recently told me how writing a truly personal story changed his life. I thought it would be great for students to read what he said, chiefly that expressing yourself with real honesty can be the key to truly captivating writing.

We know that in many cases, school media projects are driven solely by students themselves. However we also know that teacher guidance is key to help students, particularly when beginning a project and pulling together a team. Then, inevitably their learning on the job can run out of steam and some encouragement and top-down, big-picture perspective is needed.

So with this in mind, we would like to offer teachers their own masterclass in guiding students putting together a newspaper, magazine or digital edition.