Over the weekend members of The Skyline View made their way to the state capitol in Sacramento to take part in the Northern Californian Journalism Conference, or better known to journalism students throughout the state, as just NorCal.

NorCal is a single day event in which students may take part in contests and workshop from professionals in the field of journalism, photography, social media, public relations, and other fields related to the profession of journalism.

It may seem odd that public relations and social media are considered related to the field of journalism but, in truth, they are. In the case of public relations, well the relations has always been there, while in the case of social media, the relation itself can be seen within the development of the internet and it’s ability to bring content to users directly around the world.

Now, moving on, I’m very proud to announce that despite our small staff (at least compared to these other colleges newspaper staffs) we were able to win a number of awards in recognition of our effects in a number of areas from the last two semesters. These areas are for Critical Review awarded to Justine Abellana, Alana VanZanten and Rommel Conclara for Webcast/Broadcast Journalism, Rommel Conclara (again) for Video Journalism, Third Place for Online Photos Story/Essay to Kenny Martin, and General Excellence for our website.

So congratulations to them all and I’m happy to have had the chance to work together with them

I’m very proud of these results, especially of the General Excellence award for online because that was where our main focus was at last semester. It also shows that we’re moving in the right direction, with our focus on our online presents.

And, in doing so, we have encountered a number of new and old challenges.

The most obvious one of these old challenges is finding and encouraging students who are interested in learning or furthering/gaining experiences in the fields of Photography, Illustration, Public Relations, and Business. It is a fact that we here at The Skyline View have never had trouble finding students who are interested in writing.

The new challenge for us is the move from being a bi-weekly paper to a weekly paper, which started last semester and is continuing this semester with the goal being that fresh content is produced and published to our website weekly while the print edition remains a training tool for editors. Another new challenge for us is focusing more on Multimedia and Social Media as a whole.

Both of these areas are still new for us and in need of students who are interested in these fields. If working with audio, video, and pictures, or even producing content along the lines of Broadcast Journalism, is an area that interests you than Multimedia on the TSV is something that you should consider. If you’re interested in Social Media, working with twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms and love to actively interact with people then Social Media is clearly an area you should look into.

I guess this has gone on long enough so I should end it here for now and I can always talk more about it next issue. Before this ends, I’ll restate a few things, I’m very proud that we were able to win awards over the weekend as it only recognizes these former TSV Staff members hard work.