Last updated on June 20, 2025
Dallas College’s journalism programs achieved remarkable success at the 2025 Texas Intercollegiate Press Association Convention in San Marcos. Four advisors and 27 students participated in the event, competing in over 30 live contests covering journalism, photography, video production and advertising.
Dallas College students brought home six live contest victories.
Editor-in-Chief Credits Teamwork and Faculty Support
Our four student newspapers won a combined 57 awards for previously published work.
Notably, North Lake’s News-Register won first place in the Best of Show website competition and Division 4 Overall Excellence for newspapers.
With a completely new team in the newsroom this year, Eastfield’s The Et Cetera earned second place in Division 3 Overall Excellence and third place in the Two-Year Newspaper category. Ironically, none of this year’s new staff are journalism majors. Despite their limited experience, the team knew from the beginning what their driving focus should be when choosing what to report: “Why does this matter to Eastfield?” That’s the question they set out to answer to keep the student newspaper hyper-local to Eastfield campus and relatable for its students, according to Clair Williamson.
Editor-in-Chief of The Et Cetera, Williamson, is grateful for the time she had working with the newsroom team at Eastfield. Williams reflects on her experience, “The beauty of doing this at the college level is we are all learning.” Because of support from faculty and advisors, Williamson says students are in a place “where it is safe to fail” and where they have opportunities to learn skills they might not otherwise have a chance to experience.
Williamson says she was elected editor-in-chief in part because she had seniority “by a few weeks” since she was involved with the paper over the summer, shortly prior to the other team members arriving. Part of the excitement for the team this year was just figuring out the details of staff job descriptions, “how to do everything [and] who wants to do what,” according to Williamson. With no prior experience, staff members learned on the job, and the editor credits the entire team with the hard work that led to the awards The Et Cetera won at this year’s TIPA Convention.
Williamson has been accepted into the Dallas College nursing program at El Centro campus and says she will carry with her important skills she learned as editor-in-chief. “The time management skills that are needed in the newsroom are essential in the medical field,” says Williamson. “I gained a lot of skills in managing different personalities…and it was a powerful learning opportunity.”
Congratulations to the award winners and to all our Dallas College Journalism teams.