Students from Moville Community College took the top prize in this year’s NewsBrands Ireland Press Pass student journalism competition.
The students won the award for their cutting-edge student newspaper, TY Times.
Three students at the school also scooped individual awards.
Noah Kavanagh came second in the Features Journalism category, Jara Schaufler also placed second for an Opinion piece and Erin Leech won a third place prize in Sports Journalism.
The students celebrated their achievements at an awards ceremony in the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday.
Noah Kavanagh. Paul Sherwood Photography
Jara Shauffler.
Paul Sherwood Photography
Erin Leech. Paul Sherwood Photography
The event, which was hosted by Matt Cooper, was attended by the award winning schools students, their teachers and families, along with national newspaper editors and journalists.
Michael Foley, Chairman of the Press Pass Judging Panel said: “Despite the very high quality of entries in this year’s competition, the judges were unanimous in choosing this year’s overall winner. The team behind Moville Community College’s ‘TY Times’ should be immensely proud of themselves for publishing a student newspaper of such high quality. The publication stood out immediately for its attention-grabbing front page, excellent news and production values, and wide range of content which included opinion pieces, local news reports, interviews and sports news and features, and even ‘letters to the editor’. It is clear that a huge amount of work went in to creating this excellent production so congratulations to the students.”
The Special Guest at the ceremony was Catherine Martin, T.D., Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Speaking obout Press Pass, she said: “Investment in the development of critical thinking and media literacy in this country is vital, and I am acutely aware of this as Minister for Media. The importance of education in meeting the challenges of navigating today’s rapidly changing media environment cannot be understated.”
Press Pass is a Transition Year student journalism and news literacy programme which has been run by NewsBrands Ireland since 2012. The free programme, which has been completed by 120,000 students, seeks to teach the fundamentals of journalism writing, improve news literacy and critical thinking skills, and encourage students to analyse content and form opinions about important social issues.
