The SNO Report: What’s a Contest and Competition Coordinator? And more Distinguished Sites updates

On Liberty High School’s Wingspan staff, there are reporters and photographers, editors and producers, and Samantha O’Brien.

O’Brien’s in the corporate office, so to speak. Though she isn’t on the ground floor turning ideas into fully-realized, published content online, she’s upstairs, as she says, “ensuring the staff is awarded for their hard work.” She’s the Contest and Competition Coordinator.

Within a month of the SNO Distinguished Sites program being open for applications, O’Brien had Wingspan locked in as the year’s first distinguished site.

Delegating a single staff member, whether its a top editor or creating a totally separate position, to navigate awards season on behalf of everyone else… sounds like a pretty good idea, huh?

As O’Brien sees it, she’s an extension of an adviser or whoever would normally be in charge of applying for awards on staffs at other schools.

“My role is pretty easy compared to the others on the staff who bust out articles and updates on the daily, however, I do believe I play a pretty important role,” O’Brien said. “My adviser, Brian Higgins, already takes on so much with newspaper and broadcast, and it’s been nice to be able to help him out by taking over part of entering articles into contests and staying on top of those deadlines.”

It’s no throw away job. O’Brien has to stay plugged in to what’s being published, as she pretty much has free rein over which stories to enter into contests.

Relative to the SNO Distinguished Sites program, it makes applying for Excellence in Writing, Multimedia and Continuous Coverage easy — she knows the criteria and can grab any content that matches.

She’ll keep an eye on the site’s analytics to earn the Audience Engagement badge, and she helps the staff move toward Site and Story Page Excellence — the latter of which she says the staff knowingly plans content for.

“The newspaper staff is already very hard working and impressive to me,” O’Brien said, “and being able to strive towards certain awards and titles pushes them even further.”

It was the staff’s goal to achieve Distinguished Site status as soon as possible. Mission accomplished. Now, Wingspan can carry that title with them throughout the last half of the school year.

SNO Distinguished Sites program is free for all SNO customers and is still in full swing, until April 30. Here’s a bit about how it went during the first couple months:

• Wingspan is the first, and so far only SNO Distinguished Site of the 2017-2018 school year. Another school in Texas is the next closest to getting there — The Rider Online, of Mansfield Legacy High School, has earned five of six badges needed

• California is the state with the most schools in play — 6 having earned at least one distinction, with Scot Scoop News, at Carlmont High School, leading (4)

• 70 total badges have been awarded so far — in 20 states, to 38 schools

Get recognized. Submit now.