Posted Monday, April 24, 2006, The OG, news

A Uni team consisting of students from the Gargoyle and Yearbook staffs won first place in the IHSA journalism sectional competition held Saturday at the University of Illinois.

This is the first year that the IHSA, the organization that governs high school sports and other competitive activities in Illinois, has offered a journalism contest. About 100 schools participated in sectionals held around the state, including 11 schools at the U of I.

Students competed in 15 events, ranging from news writing and feature writing to computer-generated graphics and yearbook layout. Participants in each category had to finish their assignments within 90 minutes, except in the case of photography, which had a three-hour time limit.

Judges, including U of I professors and News-Gazette editors, then assessed the contestants' work according to IHSA rubrics and tallied up the results. The top four students in each event won the right to compete in the state finals, which will be held Saturday at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston.

Uni students qualified for state in 13 of the 15 categories.

The competition was held without classifying schools by enrollment size. Finishing behind Uni in the top five were Oakwood, Centennial, Peoria Richwoods, and Lovington.

The state qualifiers for Uni were:

• Ben Erickson — review writing, fourth place
• Annie Fehrenbacher — headline & caption writing, first place; copy editing, fourth place
• Matthew Freeman — news writing, first place (tie); sports writing, second place
• Max Goldberg — editorial cartooning, second place
• George Gu — yearbook theme development, first place; newspaper design (with Angelina Liang), third place
• Daisy Hassani — advertising, third place; feature writing, third place
• Daniel Ito — yearbook layout, second place (with Suran Yoo)
• Angelina Liang — computer-generated graphics, first place; newspaper design (with George Gu), third place

• Suran Yoo — yearbook layout, second place (with Daniel Ito); yearbook copy writing, fourth place

David Porreca is team coach and Gargoyle adviser. Joel Beesley is assistant coach and Yearbook adviser.

[Note: This article was updated at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 27, to include additional information about the awards won by Daniel Ito and Suran Yoo.]

— Gargoyle staff