The Texas Intercollegiate Press Association (TIPA) is one of the largest journalism conventions where both two-year colleges, and four-year universities attend. During spring break, Eastfield’s award-winning student-run newspaper The Et Cetera traveled to Denton to compete, learn and network with students all around Texas.
During the convention students were able to test their skills in different categories such as: print news writing, TV news writing, copy editing, headline writing, live video news, sports, feature photography, photo essay, magazine design, editorial cartoon and many other categories.
TIPA consisted of a total of 49 colleges including all Dallas College student-run newspapers: Brookhaven’s Brookhaven Courier, North Lake’s News-Register and Richland’s Richland Chronicle and The Et Cetera from Eastfield.
Dallas College won a total of 76 awards with the News-Register in the lead with 31 awards, The Brookhaven Courier coming in second with 23 awards, The Richland Chronicle coming in third with 17 awards and The Et Cetera winning five. As each campus congratulated each other and themselves; the accomplishment of winning many awards for Dallas College reminded these students that even though they are on different teams, the young journalists all come from the same place.
Throughout past conventions and competitions Dallas College newspapers have been divided and competing against each other rather than competing with each other. This convention sparked unity between all Dallas College journalism organizations.
During TIPA, editors of these organizations came together to discuss that the newsrooms will now start moving as one under the same department maintaining the uniqueness of each student-run newspaper under a dean.
The main goal of integrating the newsrooms is to be collaborative. This goal will be achieved by meeting with each campus’ top editors and having monthly meetings.
The three campuses that do not have a newsroom but soon will are El Centro, Cedar Valley and Mountain View, which can affect the budget for all organizations. As Dallas College student-run newspapers are starting to become one department this will allow newsrooms from different campuses to collaborate.
