Conestoga’s Spoke Newspaper / Web publication earns “Best of Philly” Award

The publishers of Philadelphia Magazine noted the publication’s gutsy approach to journalism, writing, ““Nationally recognized and award-winning, Conestoga’s seasoned journalists learn to tackle serious topics – growing up gay, teen pregnancy, swine flu, illegal gambling – for their published-seven-times-a-year paper and even richer, ever-updating website, Stoganews.com.”  No further information about the magazine’s accolades for this top-notch program may be found on the web (yet) – you’ll have to buy a copy of the magazine to get the full scoop.

PSPA congratulates the staff and advisers of The Spoke for a job well-done!  Everyone at Conestoga High School can take pride in this exemplary program, the best in Philly and one of the best in Pennsylvania.

Want to weigh in on a topic to be offered at the regional conference in Carlisle on Oct. 3?  Even if you’re in a different region, please weigh in on what topics would be helpful to your staff.  Vote in the online poll, or let us know in the comments below.

Interviewing skills
Deciding what’s newsworthy (Beginner/intermediate session)
Localizing state and national stories
Writing tighter
Crafting compelling leads

Something else?

Are you a PA student journalist or PA journalism adviser?  Dude (or Dudette): you need to join this website.  Go to the top-right corner.  Click on Sign-Up.  Enter a username, password, email, tell us a few things about yourself, and create an avatar (or not) – and you’re in.  Soon you’ll be conversing with students and advisers from Erie to Philly. 

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Remember last May?  You were sitting there with all those research papers to grade and journals to look at, and you said to yourself: “I must remember to suggest this to the publications staff I advise . . .”  What was that this?  What are you going to try differently this year?   This blog could be a great repository of innovative ideas for the novice adviser and staff.

In Pennsylvania schools, is the First Amendment as palpable as Geometry class, or lockers – or is it a facade, an illusion?  May the journalists in your school - the broadcasters, the artists, the sports writers, the yearbook editors choosing photos – speak freely?  Or not?

It’s that time of year.  I mean, the time when the teenagers on your yearbook staff spend way too much picking out a color scheme to accompany the book’s theme.  Fortunately, there are many web-based tools out there to speed up this process so that they can get to work!

Whether you have a theme already selected or not, check out Cymbolism.  According to the site, it tries to “quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.”  Whenever you first load the site, you are given word, and asked to choose the color that you associate with the word.  Imagine thousands of folks doing this a day, and you’ve got a powerful tool.  Click the Words button at the top to check out the results for all of the words on the site, organized alphabetically.  You can even compare results over time.

If you like daily inspiration with color schemes, browse on over to COLOURlovers, and check out their blog.  Sometimes they find videos or photos and build color schemes based on them, and other posts include unique patterns.  In fact, their Palette library contains over 900,000 different user-generated combinations.  Regardless, the color combinations are always thought-provoking.  This site provides a nice resource for keeping current with current trends in colorful design.  Also check out their COPASCO tool to work with custom combinations.

ColoRotate allows you to drag-and-drop colors using a unique 3D tool.

There are many sites out there that allow you to create, mix, match, save, and export color schemes.  One of the newest and, in my opinion, coolest, is ColoRotate.  ColoRotate is similar to lots of other color scheme generators, with one big exception: you can design schemes in 3D using their unique tool that allows for dragging and dropping of colors.  Back in the 2D world, there is a large selection of color combination sites, including:

• Adobe’s Kuler (which you can directly plugin to CS4) – my personal fav
• Color Scheme Designer
• Color Jack (check out the Sphere and Galaxy tools)
• Color Combos
• Kolur – If you’re having trouble visualizing your palettes applied to your actual designs, check out this site where palettes are applied to graphic samples, making it easier to visualize the final product.

In addition to the sites above, there also sites that are specifically built to extract/built color palettes based on images that you upload.  Each of them has its own little bells and whistles.  Here’s a short list:

• Pictaculous (my personal fav)
• Color Hunter
• Colr
• Color Palette Generator

For even more color palette tools, check out Web Design Booth’s The Ultimate List of Online Color Tools for Web Developers (41 and counting).