Winners announced for the 2023 Geoff Lealand Student Challenge

The first prize winner for 2023 is Josef Gillgren, year 13 student from of Hamilton Boys High School. His video titled 'Crime Reporting A Tale of Murder and Cultivation Theory' is an entertaining and thorough look at all the issues behind news reporting of law and order. We recommend you watch it here. Josef wins the 1st prize of $1,000 and his school also benefits with a bonus prize of $500 for the media studies department.

This year's 2nd prize winner is another video, this time by Sophie Siebert, year 13 from Palmerston North Girls High School. 'Sensitization' is a thorough and perceptive analysis of the issues of mean world syndrome, politics and media management. We also recommend watching it here. Sophie wins the second prize of $500.

There were many other great entries into this year's Student Challenge and we thank all the student's who enterred for giving it a go and thinking about how our media affects the world we live in.

Here's some of the highly commended entries:

Mina Garay - year 11, Tawa College - essay titled Like the Dead & Their Killers (They're Born to be Stories). Mina was a very close third place with this well researched, thoughtful and nicely presented essay.

Barry Baldo - year 9, Cambridge High School - video titled Crime reporting, My perspective. Very impressive for a year 9 student. Keep up the good work.

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To enter, secondary school students had to answer the following questions withn a piece of content:

Do news media focus too much on crime reporting? Is that good or bad for New Zealand?

The Judges decision are final. Thank you to all the students who enterred. Please enter again next year!