Seventeen categories allow students to work on creating photographs, videos, multimedia, illustrations and designs in advance of the February submission deadline. Using a prompt provided below by KSPA, the students create their journalism and then submit it online. Comments from judges are returned to advisers via email after the contest results are final.
Nine additional contests of writing include categories like feature writing, copyediting and cutline writing. Using notes or prompts provided by KSPA in February, students have a couple of days to craft stories, editorials and cutlines that are judged by local professionals. Students receive feedback through rubrics and notes on their writing.
Note: These contests are subject to KSPA’s policy on Artificial Intelligence.
Visual prompts posted: Dec. 4, 2023
Deadline for contest registration: Jan. 22, 2024
Writing prompts posted: 6 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2024
Writing entries due: Feb. 1 at 11 p.m.
Visual entries due: Feb. 8 at 11 p.m.
Results of Regional Contest posted: March 5 or earlier
As we continue to work towards creating the best environment for learning and growth for student journalists in Kansas, we’re introducing new measures to safeguard the integrity of KSPA contests from artificial intelligence.
This policy will apply to the Regional and State writing contests. Other policies may be developed in the future.
The use of artificial intelligence is prohibited in all KSPA contests. KSPA’s goals remain the same: encouraging learning, providing feedback and developing journalists through competitions. The use of artificial intelligence by competitors would damage these goals.
To protect the integrity of KSPA contests, we are implementing two new protocols for the 2024 contests.
To read the full policy, please see the link below.
The Regional Contests are being held at the same time that KSPA will offer three Winter Workshops around the state.
The KSPA Winter Workshops will provide students with an on-campus and in-person experience to learn a single specialized skill in media or journalism. The events replace the Regional Contests traditionally held during February on university campuses. In response to successful on-campus events the last three years KSPA is again these days of learning to members.
At a minimum, schools will need to provide funds for student lunches. The pricing for these lunches will be built into registration fees for the event.
Some university locations might also charge an attendance fee per student. More information will be provided in mid-December on the Winter Workshop information page.
Besides these small meal costs, all schools participating in the Regional Contest can register students for the Winter Workshops at no cost. Schools not participating in the Regional Contest will pay a registration fee plus lunch costs to attend the Winter Workshops.
FEB. 12 (MONDAY): Wichita State University
FEB. 14 (WEDNESDAY): University of Kansas
FEB. 15 (THURSDAY): Fort Hays State University
To compete in the KSPA Writing Contests, students will complete Google Forms. Each Google form will provide a 65-minute timer. If a student has not submitted their entry by the end of the 65-minute time period, the form will auto-submit their progress as the entry for the judge to consider.
To compete in the KSPA Writing Contests, all schools must comply with the KSPA Artificial Intelligence Policy. That policy, approved by the KSPA board in 2023, requires students to complete their entire writing contest entry in a proctored location. This proctored location will ensure that students do not have access to artificial intelligence and that they do not use it to create their writing entry.
We encourage advisers to plan ahead for proctoring times and locations at their school during the KSPA Writing Contest competition window.
Some Kansas school districts allow students to enroll at their high school and a school district academy, often to learn specialized skills. In those circumstances, for the purposes of state and regional contests KSPA will require:
KSPA urges all judges in all categories and classifications to award 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th place.
However, some judges will decide to award fewer than six places. In the past, some judges have cited these reasons for not awarding three honorable mentions:
This circumstance — with fewer than six award winners — is more common in Regional Contests than the State Contest. Advisers should be aware of this possibility. The KSPA staff will follow up with judges to request they submit six award winners unless one of bullet points above applies.
Regarding all photography, video and online categories: when writing captions for the images or completing coverage, there is no need to change the name of the school or the people in the photo or video to make the entry anonymous. Jerseys, t-shirts and signs in the photos often make it obvious to the judge what school is entering the contest. Students: please write the coverage and caption as you would for your publication.
Additionally, students and advisers should know that complete and well-researched captions are part of the judging criteria in Academic Photography, Sports Feature Photograph, Sports Action Photography and Student Life Photography.
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Questions about the contests or conferences?
Please mail checks to:
And you can reach executive director Eric Thomas and administrative assistant Haylee Hedge by phone at (785) 864-0605 or via email at staff@kspaonline.org.
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Starting 2019, KSPA researched how to improve our the Regional contests for you. That year, we introduced a way to make the Regional Contests both more fair and more convenient. And it was a huge success! We know the changes encouraged long-time members to keep competing. And of course, we loved seeing new schools join the fun.
The KSPA staff will create Regionals with a — more or less — balanced number of schools in each Regional Grouping. Rather than guessing at how many schools will attend a regional, KSPA will make regional groupings after we know how many schools are competing.
Advisers simply complete registration by the deadline. Using those registrations, KSPA will create regional groupings based on the number of schools that register. For about every seven schools, KSPA will create a regional. So, in 2019, 43 schools competed in 5A/6A Regionals. That created 6 regionals.
We will be sure to publish regional groupings soon after that initial registration deadline. Plus, our digital submission system will automatically slot entries from your school into the correct regional grouping.
Nearby schools will likely be in the same regional. However, we will avoid — as much as possible — clustering high schools from the same school district into the same regional. For instance, schools in the AnyTown School District might be distributed into a few different regional groupings, even though they are geographically close to one another. [/expand]
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This sheet is not a required step in the registration process, but should help advisers in gathering — whether on paper or digitally — the information needed to organize for the KSPA Regional Contest. Advisers do not need to communicate the names and email addresses of their students upon registration. Students will provide their names upon submission of their entry. Gathering email addresses will be helpful if advisers want to add students as authorized entrants to the digital submission contest system at BetterBNC.com.
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Nine writing Categories will be offered. Submission of entries will occur through Google Classrooms. Please be sure that your school district allows for Google Classroom access — or that your students can access Google Classrooms through another device.
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Seventeen Visual categories will be offered.
Entries to Visual Categories are submitted using BetterBNC Media Awards Platform. The system will allow for secure submissions, quick judging and high-quality feedback. This document provides in-depth instructions, including video tutorials.
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Students can reference the rubrics to see the qualities that judges usually seek. Here are rubrics and some comments that judges often make. (Please note that some rubrics are still being developed for newly added categories.)
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A particular student may only participate in five total categories, whether individually or as a team.
A school can submit up to two entries in each category, unless the school is using “Wild Card” entries in that category.
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[expand title=”click on arrow for more info”]The fee for each entry is $12.
No partial refunds can be issued for unused registrations.
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Want a preview of what the Writing Category prompts will be like? Want a classroom activity for your students? Need an emergency lesson plan?
KSPA has a page of prompts from previous state and regional contests for you. We will continue to add to the collection as we search through our archives.
ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: please notice that some of the rules and formats for the contests have changed (most recently for the News Page Design Contest). Be sure to read all directions for this year’s contest for guidance.
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Check out our “Simply Better” page, a showcase of the award-winning entries from previous Regional and State competitions. These examples can be used as classroom examples for students who will compete in State.
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Your KSPA Staff!
