The State Chair

Newspaper, yearbook, broadcast, photography, TV production. No matter what type of journalism you are in, all journalists have one thing in common: their love for storytelling. From the East to the West Coast, all journalists gather in Orlando for one weekend of fun. This would not have been possible without Addison Gear (’23) and the Florida Scholastic Press Association leadership board.

Gear is a senior at H.B. Plant High School and the State Chair of FSPA. She is the Coverage Editor-In-Chief of the Panthers yearbook as well.

Gear has had a long history with Journalism. She was on her middle school’s yearbook staff and decided to join Journalism when she moved on to high school. But it wasn’t till her junior year of high school that she got a leadership position on the staff, which only furthered her love for Journalism.

“Junior year, I was given this position, which was a new position at the time, but it really let me focus in on what sort of book we wanted to have and what stories we wanted to tell,” Gear said. “I had a lot of fun with that and I kinda fell in love with the storytelling part of it all.”

In 2021, she decided to run for the District 4 Representative position. For Gear, the position meant more than just the title.

“Getting involved with FSPA, I decided I have to go all in on this and decide if this is exactly what I wanted to do as a career,” Gear said. “The more I went in with Journalism, the more I have just completely fallen in love with it.”

Going into senior year, Gear was elected to be the State Chair of FSPA. To no one’s surprise, the position was a challenge. This year, 1500 people are here in Orlando at the State Convention. The FSPA leadership board, consisting of eight student representatives, is in charge of almost all of the planning for the event. Surely, much preparation was done before everyone’s arrival.

“We met in December at this hotel and we spent three days working on what we wanted this year’s convention to look like… We wanted to move in a different direction, focusing more on the community and its importance,” Gear said.

The theme for the 2022-2023 FSPA convention is Stars Align. Gear and the others had one goal in mind for the convention: creating a home for Florida journalists.

“The word constellations kept coming up… We started with the visual: the little stars and how they all connected to one big Florida and this constellation of aligning at Orlando. We landed with [the theme] Stars Align, which was our vision for this entire weekend, creating this community and letting people branch out because we all have this shared common interest,” Gear said.