Berkeley High Jacket

"The Jacket" is the student newspaper serving the roughly three thousand students of Berkeley High School, California. The paper is published every other Friday and is usually sixteen pages long. There are five sections in the paper: news, opinion, features, entertainment, and sports. The staff of "The Jacket" includes over fifty student editors, reporters, photographers, and business staff members as well as one faculty advisor. The name is taken from the mascot of Berkeley High School, the Yellowjacket. From around the mid-1950s into the early 1960s, the paper was a daily, printed by students in the school's own print shop. Most issues at that time were one-sheets, that is, two-sided, 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages. Friday issues were usually four pages in length.

History

"School Colors"

In 1994, Frontline (PBS), produced a four-hour documentary about racial politics at Berkeley High School entitled "School Colors" [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/teach/schoolcolorsguide.html] , including a segment about "The Jacket". The paper's editorial board was extremely vocal throughout the broadcasting of the program and the internal strife that followed.

Journalist of the Year

In the late 1990s, the paper gained widespread prominence after reporters Megan Greenwell and Iliana Montauk broke a story in Berkeley that resulted in criminal prosecution. "The Jacket" first reported that local business-owner Lakireddy Bali Reddy and his family were importing young women from India to work as sex slaves after one such woman died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a Berkeley apartment complex.

In 2000, The Jacket staff was named "Journalist of the Year" by the "Northern California Society of Professional Journalists", becoming the first-ever non-professional winner of the SPJ's highest honor [http://spj.org/norcal/eijwinners.html] .

External links

* " [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/2000/01/21/NEWS13537.dtl Young Berkeley journalists broke landlord story early] "