CAGAYAN de Oro will host this year’s National Schools Press Conference to be held from July 17 to 21, the Department of Education said.

For this year’s NSPC, only the top regional winner per medium will compete in the individual categories and only one team, composed of five members, per medium in the group categories. Moreover, a campus journalist can participate only in one event, either in individual or group category.

Top 5 regional winners per medium, on the other hand, will be eligible to join the school paper category.

Similar to previous years, participants will vie for individual honors in various journalistic categories such as News Writing, Features Writing, Editorial Writing, Sports Writing, Copyreading and Headline Writing, Science and Technology Writing, Photojournalism, Editorial Cartooning and Column Writing.

Teams from the elementary and secondary levels will compete in the Radio Script Writing and Broadcasting and Collaborative Desktop Publishing, while only secondary learners will take on Online Publishing and TV Script Writing and Broadcasting for the group contests.

Entries for the school paper contest will be judged based on the News Section, Features Section, Editorial Section, Science and Technology Section, Sports Section, and Layout and Page Design.
Mobile journalism, which is set to be an added category in the next few years, will be introduced in a concurrent session to be attended by 10 secondary campus journalists (five in English, five in Filipino) and 10 school paper advisers from each region.

With the theme “From Campus Journalism to Real-World Journalism: Shaping Minds from Schools to Societies,” the annual Schools Press Conference will also award outstanding school paper advisers and campus journalists.