La Voz Staff wins awards
November 14, 2015
De Anza College won five awards at the recent 2015 Journalism Association of Community Colleges Northern California Conference.
Held on Saturday Nov. 7 at Sacramento State University, the conference had 35 colleges represented and over 30 awards given out, in addition to hosting workshops and contest.
Contests were divided into two categories: publication awards and on-the-spot awards.
De Anza College won one on-the-spot award and four publication awards.
For a photo that she took at Burning Man 2014, Alena Naiden, 24, Features and Web Editor, won first place in the Feature Photo publication award category.
“It was a picture of a dust storm, and it’s very dangerous to take photos in a dust storm for the camera, but it was so beautiful that I still wanted to take that photo,” Naiden said.
Editors of La Voz submitted Naiden’s photo to the contest in spring without her knowledge, so she was surprised when her photo was displayed as the first place winner in that category.
editor-in-chief of La Voz Adrian Discipulo, 21, won second place in Features Photo.
La Voz also won a third place award for Online General Excellence, and former reporter Lan Nguyen won a third place award for a critical review of the popular dating app Tinder.
For the on-the-spot awards, De Anza student Duane Soubirous achieved second place in the copyediting contest.
About 50 students took the 50-question copyediting test, which tested knowledge of Associated Press style, grammar and current affairs.
“I was very happy that I got second,” Soubirous said. “I knew I did well but I didn’t know how well I did.”
Although this is Soubrious’ first quarter taking journalism classes, he attributes his success on the copywriting test to a news writing class that he is currently taking with journalism instructor Farideh Dada.
Cecilia Deck, journalism professor at De Anza College and adviser for La Voz, said she is was proud of the staff’s accomplishments.
“I was really proud of the students who won the awards. They worked really hard and getting photo awards is great because photo is part of what we try to showcase in La Voz,” Deck said.
De Anza students will attend a state-wide JACC conference this spring in Burbank, and Deck said she expects the team to do well.
