As the adviser of the student media here at Truman High School I have rarely written anything on this website. However, times are a bit different, and this is a good platform to disseminate information to the masses. I wanted to update a few things about this site and our yearbook as well as some award information.

Normally, today is a massive day for the student journalists at our school and other schools across the state. This is “J-Day”. It’s a day where students go down to the University of Missouri and attend workshops, hang out with friends, and then find out what awards they might have won for their efforts throughout the year. It’s an event that the students in this program look forward to all year. I am always happy to see the students excited to win their awards. However, I rarely take time to broadcast the awards we win on this platform or our other platforms. Mostly, because while I am happy and excited for them, journalism is not really about winning awards. I also tend to find journalistic awards a tad bit on the subjective side. There’s been many very deserving pieces that don’t get recognition and others that have won that frankly shocked me. This is not to say that awards are bad or the award givers do a bad job. There’s simply a level of subjectivity to awarding art that will always exist. I also tend to encourage my more advanced students to experiment with breaking rules in pursuit of more interesting composition. This often leads to being docked “points” for not following guidelines. However, anyone that’s ever done art on any professional level knows that the best art comes from experimentation, failure, and not following all of the rules all of the time.

But, these are not normal times. And since I would love for my students to earn recognition they will not be able to receive on stage at J-Day here are the awards that the staff earned this year. If you know any of these students please congratulate them for their hard work.