Last week several members of the Newsstreak team traveled to Anaheim, California for the JEA/NSPA Spring Convention. Eleven students, accompanied by three adults, went to the high school journalism convention.

The Newsstreak team had a very impressive showing. Maria Rose, an editor-in-chief on the Newsstreak staff, won runner up for National Journalist of the Year. The competition pits the best 50 journalists in the nation (one from each state) against each other.

“[It was] all about your portfolio,” says Rose, “you had to pick your best works.”

Though Rose had to do a lot of work putting together her portfolio, she found that the hardest part was “creatively [expressing] what journalism meant to me.”

“[It was] really stressful,” says Rose, “rather than being an emotion, I expressed it through the portfolio.”

Along with this prestigious individual award, the Newsstreak team also won the Pacemaker Award for online journalism. There is a Pacemaker awarded to the top ten publications in print, online, and yearbook journalism.

“The best part,” says Phillip Bannister, another member of the Newsstreak team, “was finding out that we won a Pacemaker for the first time.”

Other events at the convention involved seminars and talks by famous writers and journalists like the Ling sisters and Steve Lopez, author of The Soloist.

“I learned a lot about Laura [Ling’s] story,” says Paulina Rendon, a staff reporter, “[like] when she got kidnapped in North Korea and how she coped with that. It was really amazing.”

Even so, California wasn’t all business.

“It was amazing,” says Rendon, “[the best parts] were California Adventures and Disneyland.”

For others, the trip was chock full of new experiences. For example, it was Bannister’s first time on an airplane. He described the ride as being “like a roller coaster.”

“The experience of going to California was great,” says Bannister, “really friendly people.”