Tower Wins National Awards for Reporting on Parkland

 

The student-run newspaper has now won two awards from Columbia Scholastic Press Association for their Special Parkland Edition, published in April of 2018.

The special edition was selected as one of only three award winners for Single Subject News or Feature Package, and Cedar Berrol-Young ’18 was recognized for excellence in a news feature for his article “‘People Didn’t Think it Could Happen Again,’ A Survivor Remembers Virginia Tech,” which profiled Upper School history teacher Brendon Barrios, who was a freshman at Virginia Tech during the 2007 shooting at that school.

 

The special edition is filled with the testimonies of those who survived the shooting, who not only shared their experiences from that day, but also expounded on issues such as the difficulties of returning to school, activism, and school security. “There is nothing more powerful than direct testimony,” said David Oks ’19, who was an opinion editor last year while working on the special edition, and is now lead magazine editor. “We thought it would be a much better way to tell the story” by sharing the survivors’ words directly.

Alex Bentzien ’19, a features editor last year and now one of Tower’s editors-in-chief, agreed, noting that “We really wanted to showcase the unity within that school … we really wanted to let them speak for themselves.”

Ellen Cowhey, Upper School journalism teacher and advisor to Tower, was particularly struck by the team’s interest in speaking with those “whose voices we hadn’t heard yet.” Cowhey noted that the interview subjects were often so generous with their time and their words that it was hard to winnow the content for a four-page broadsheet issue.

Fitting the content into the allocated space was far from the most difficult aspect of work, though. “Certainly, it was a lot more emotionally demanding than we were used to ... We were dealing with issues of life and death, with people who had lost friends. The words felt a lot weightier,” shared Oks. “We felt a great sense of loyalty, to preserving what they were saying, that their story was being honored.”

The idea for a special edition came out of a question the Tower staff had asked themselves in the wake of the shooting: “What can we do? How can we participate?” Receiving the two awards, says Bentzien, “shows that our work has meaning.”

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