Student Newspaper

The student newspaper at Centennial High School has scooped the competition.Last month, Wingspan won the Marylander Award in the annual Maryland Scholastic Press Association contest, making it the state's best.Their newspaper is best, editors say, because students are serious about the job that needs to be done. "There's a professional atmosphere, and we try to [produce] a professional newspaper," says Chad Hawthorne, an editor.In winning the award, Wingspan edged out Montgomery County high schools known for their first-rate journalism programs.

The University of Maryland's independent student newspaper will cut publishing to four days a week in the fall, Michael Fribush, president of parent company Maryland Media Inc., confirmed Friday. "We'll beef up our digital presence on Fridays. It'll be a little more economical to publish Monday through Thursday," he said. "[Editor-in-Chief Michael King] would be putting out a Friday issue on The Diamondback but digitally. " The Diamondback has been a weekday publication since its establishment in 1910 and receives no university funding, according to its website.

COLLEGE PARK - About 40 students gathered outside the offices of the University of Maryland's student newspaper yesterday to protest a cartoon it ran Tuesday about the death this week of an American woman acting as a "human shield" in the Gaza Strip. Rachel Corrie, 23, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., was killed Sunday as she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying the home of a Palestinian physician. Witnesses said Corrie, a North Carolina native, knelt in front of the machine, which kept coming and crushed her. The Israeli military said the driver didn't see her in time.

Passengers aboard a recent flight from Denver to San Diego might have noticed a whole lot of shakin' going on. The Harlem Shake, that is - a viral dance craze sweeping across the nation from sea to sky? The video shows passengers dancing in the aisles of a Frontier Airlines flight cruising along at more than 30,000 feet. According to The Catalyst , a Colorado College student newspaper, the students were traveling from Colorado Springs for an ultimate frisbee contest. While a spokeswoman for Frontier Airlines has said the seat belt sign was off and no passengers were in danger, the FAA is reportedly looking into the incident.

A debate over free speech erupted this week on the Johns Hopkins University campus after a student newspaper published an editorial cartoon featuring an anti-Chinese slur and hundreds of copies of the paper were stolen, apparently by angry students.A series of student groups and Hopkins administrators condemned both the cartoon, which appeared in last Friday's edition of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, and the subsequent theft of the newspapers.Newspaper editors, meanwhile, are defending the cartoon on free-speech grounds but are expected to print several critical responses in today's edition of the weekly paper.

The staff of the Spokesman, Morgan State University's student newspaper, expected to make a trip to their printer yesterday morning and distribute their latest effort around campus, getting their stories about student government elections in the hands of voters going to the polls. Instead, they found that school officials -- who said they feared those elections might be disrupted by the newspaper -- stopped the presses just as they were about to run off 3,000 copies of the twice-monthly paper.

EMMITSBURG -- Mount St. Mary's College, a Catholic school in the placid hills of Frederick County, finds itself embroiled in a constitutional debate -- not over freedom of religion, but over freedom of the press. In February, college officials sent a letter of reprimand to William M. Lawbaugh, faculty adviser to the student newspaper the Mountain Echo. Lawbaugh was told his expected pay raise of $3,800 would be withheld until he proved he would "serve the college as a responsible teacher of journalism."

PLENTY OF things deserve the protection of confidentiality. Parking fines are not among them.When parking spaces are as rare as they are at University of Maryland College Park, the competition for finding one can be as fierce as an NCAA basketball play-off.So imagine how students, faculty and administrators must have felt to learn a couple of years ago that a basketball player had found his own way of shutting out the competition by parking pretty much as he pleased -- accumulating more than $8,000 in fines in the process.

A year after being celebrated as one of the top college football coaches in the country, Towson's Rob Ambrose has been accused by a disgruntled former player of breaking NCAA rules and making offensive remarks to help pump up his team in a pre-game pep talk earlier this season. In a letter to the school newspaper, The Towerlight, Trevor Walker wrote that Ambrose lied to the athletic department's compliance officer about the number of hours the team practiced this summer and that the fourth-year coach used inappropriate language on many occasions, including before a game against St. Francis last month.

There are any number of good reasons why college students shouldn't spend much time watching screenings of pornographic movies on school property or reading racy sex columns in the school newspaper. But it's not the job of college administrators or state lawmakers to make those decisions for them. There may indeed be little journalistic value in "The Bed Post," a sex column that appeared in The Towerlight, Towson University's student newspaper. Aside from its questionable taste, it violated many of the standards student publications traditionally are supposed to teach aspiring young reporters and editors, such as the necessity of judging what is worthy of coverage as news and a willingness to stand behind the facts in a story.

Twenty-seven Tufts men's lacrosse players will be suspended for two games this season after "unacceptable behavior," including racist and sexist insults, at a women's volleyball game against Smith College last semester, the Tufts Daily student newspaper has reported. An external investigation was launched by the school's Office of Equal Opportunity after a student accused the players of "calling out sexist and racist insults that disparagingly referenced the Smith players by name and threatened them during the game" Sept.

A year after being celebrated as one of the top college football coaches in the country, Towson's Rob Ambrose has been accused by a disgruntled former player of breaking NCAA rules and making offensive remarks to help pump up his team in a pre-game pep talk earlier this season. In a letter to the school newspaper, The Towerlight, Trevor Walker wrote that Ambrose lied to the athletic department's compliance officer about the number of hours the team practiced this summer and that the fourth-year coach used inappropriate language on many occasions, including before a game against St. Francis last month.

Wedding date: October 13, 2012 Her story: Angela Horner, 27, grew up in Severn. She lives in Baltimore's Pigtown and is licensing team manager at Laureate Education. Her father, Robert Horner, is a physicist in the electronics industry. Her mother, Gloria Horner, is a Hospice of the Chesapeake volunteer, and teaches English as a second language through her church, Severn Run Evangelical Presbyterian Church. His story: Chris Montgomery, 34, grew up in Pasadena. He lives in Baltimore's Pigtown and is a network administrator at Anne Arundel Community College.

I went to college to become an actress. Faithful readers will not be surprised to learn of my dramatic inclinations, but I had leading roles in all my high school plays, and I was Pennsylvania state champion in forensics before it was something used to solve murders on television. A career in the theater was going to be a tough sell to parents who had never gone to college themselves and weren't sure what I was doing to begin with. So I told my parents I was going to college to become a speech and theater teacher so that I could, in turn, direct high school plays and teach students the confidence-building value of competing in forensics, before it became something real-life juries wanted to see more of. But when I got to college, I found that everybody in the theater department was having sex with everybody else and, being that I was the last virgin on the floor section of my dorm, it freaked me out. So I joined the student newspaper to write about theater — those who can, do; those who can't, report on it — and began my life as a journalist.

Maryland Terrapins men's basketball player Pe'Shon Howard was arrested early Sunday and given a criminal citation for disorderly conduct, a university police spokesman confirmed. A campus officer was flagged down for a fight at the Shanghai Café in the 7400 block of Baltimore Avenue in College Park at about 2:25 a.m., according to Capt. Marc Limansky. Inside, people were holding one man back, and police took him outside and sat him down. Limansky said Howard, 21, was shouting at the man and taunting him and was told to stop.

Maryland freshman linebacker Alex Twine was arrested Friday night in Prince George's County. Twine, who turned 18 on Friday, has been charged with disorderly conduct and failure to obey a reasonable and lawful order. Maryland's student newspaper, The Diamondback, first reported Twine's arrest . The 6-foot-2, 220-pound linebacker from Gaithersburg is scheduled to make a court appearance Jan. 30 at 1:15 p.m. in Hyattsville. Twine appeared in 11 games as a freshman, starting four.

Vanessa Junkin, daughter of Valerie Junkin of Hampstead, and George Junkin of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., has received the Achievement Key Award at the 2011 Spring Honors Convocation at Salisbury University. The Achievement Key award is presented by the University Honors Convocation Committee, and is based on scholarship and campus service. Junkin is a senior majoring in communication arts. She is editor in chief of The Flyer student newspaper, and a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Lambda Eta Sigma and the Thomas E. Bellavance Honors Program.

DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association before it dissolved on Friday, will deliver Maryland's spring commencement address in College Park on May 19. According to The Diamondback , the university's student newspaper, a committee of about 20 students chose Smith , who went to law school at Virgnia, for "a variety of reasons. " The whole NFLPA thing was probably the primary one. "He is the only executive director of the NFL Players Association to have never played professional football," student Brian Toll, the senior council's commencement speaker chairman, told the newspaper.