Boiling Point wins honors at NSPA convention in San Antonio

By Tamar Willis, Features Editor

November 18, 2012

A seven-student Boiling Point delegation finished off its weekend at the NSPA convention in San Antonio with the paper’s first award for the 2012-2013 school year. It was a 10th-place Best of Show award in the competitive large newspaper category.

The category is the tough to win an award in because it has all the largest schools in the country, according Logan Aimone, the Executive Director of the NSPA.

“It feels wonderful to be recognized for all those late nights of hard work, staying at the school until 11:30 pm when the security guard needs to kick us out,” said Jacob Ellenhorn, one of the Boiling Point’s Co-Editors-in-Chief.

“The other schools in the category are huge schools that have tons of time to work on their newspapers. It’s amazing that we’re being recognized with a small staff and only three computers.”

The Boiling Point also picked up its plaque for being a Pacemaker finalist, which is the NSPA’s most prestigious award. Although they were disappointed that they didn’t win, the nomination is an honor in itself.

“The much bigger distinction is between finalist and everybody else,” said the Boiling Point’s advisor Joelle Keene. “Half of the finalists become Pacemakers but only nine out of hundreds of papers made it to finalist. Nothing could compare to how it felt to be named a finalist. This is the highest honor the Boiling Point has ever received.”

Along with these honors, the Boiling Point brought home two Honorable Mention certificates in the Story of the Year contest, one in the Multimedia category for last year’s staff coverage of the kaparot ritual on Erev Yom Kippur, and the other in the Diversity category for Leila Miller ’12’s three-story package on Haredi teenagers.

About the Contributor

Tamar Willis, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus

Tamar Willis is a graduate of Princeton University where she wrote and served as business manager for the culture magazine Nassau Weekly. She joined the Boiling Point staff in ninth grade and served as Staff Writer, Features Editor, Outside News Editor and Sports Editor, winning national awards in feature writing from Quill and Scroll, the American Jewish Press Association and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. In high school, English and US History were her favorite subjects, and she loved to read and write, especially for the Boiling Point! Tamar says that if she were a punctuation mark, she would be an Oxford comma or an exclamation point. Tamar could eat sushi for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and she thinks Clueless is one of the best movies ever made. Tamar was Deputy Editor and then Editor-in-Chief of the Boiling Point in 2013-14 school year, leading the paper to its second CSPA Gold Crown Award the following spring. After graduating from Shalhevet, she attended the international-and-Israel gap year program Kivunim.