Penning opinions Penning opinions (January 09, 2004)

Student earns journalism awards
by Teresa C. Brown

Las Positas College student Scott Lanway of Pleasanton earned both a first place and honorable mention award during a journalism competition held in San Francisco recently.

Lanway was one of five students from Las Positas College's student newspaper, the Express, who took a total of eight awards at the Journalism Association of Community Colleges Northern California conference. His opinion story titled "Video Games" earned first-place honors.

"We are extremely proud of our success at this very competitive conference, both for the individual awards and for the two awards to the newspaper staff," said Melissa Korber, mass communications professor at Las Positas.

In his opinion story, Lanway wrote, "The rejection of video games as a form of free speech could only come from men and women who have never laid eyes on a joystick or game pad in their entire lives, much less played a game like Doom or Grand Theft Auto."

"... Truth be told, today's video games have more in common with Hollywood than they do with the old days of Pong and Centipede. Even sports games like Sega's World Series Baseball almost perfectly resemble TV broadcasts of their real-life counterparts, complete with licenses and broadcasters. But there is one very big difference: U.S. law recognizes motion pictures broadcast to television as a means of cultural expression and protects them as speech under the First Amendment."

Lanway also earned an honorable mention for his opinion story on marijuana. The Las Positas student is enrolled in the school's mass communications department, which includes courses in journalism, photojournalism, editing and college newspaper production.

The competition was held at San Francisco State University and pitted community college newspapers from throughout Northern California, including Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose, against each other.

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