Place Name: First Place Contestant Name: West Chicago High School Entry Title: Bows, blush, and Baroque: Inside the coquette aesthetic taking over Gen Z fashion Entry Credit: Cris Correa Judge Comment: This is a very target audience-oriented headline. Knowing the audience and how to write to the audience is crucial to generating interest in media where attention is hard to gain.
Place Name: Second Place Contestant Name: Maine West High School Entry Title: Navigating the Future, Now Entry Credit: Joseph Murphy Judge Comment: The contrast between "future" and "now," emphasized by the separation of the two words by a comma, is a nice juxtaposition. The traditionalist in me would still like to see a subject to pair with the verb "navigating."
Place Name: Third Place Contestant Name: Maine West High School Entry Title: Breaking the Cycle: the impact of difficult parent relationships Entry Credit: Taryn Mcgannon, Giuseppe Bruno Judge Comment: The use of one headline to encompass a series of stories on the same spread is difficult. By itself, the headline doesn't offer much that is meaningful (the main headline uses a verb with no subject; the subhead uses the vague "impact," which could mean so many different things), but looking at the holistic view of the page, it works well enough as a broad brush for the full scope of the content.
