Tucked just underneath a stairwell outside the culinary hallway, Room 112 is Robinson’s journalism classroom, which produces not only Robinson’s Excalibur yearbook, but also KNN Morning Show and the two student newspapers, RHStoday and Knight Writers. This year, for the first time since journalism teacher Joanie Oben took up the class in 2015, RHStoday is hosting a writing competition free to all underclassmen and incoming freshman.

For the competition, students will have to write either an opinion piece or an A&E review. The guidelines, which are the standard guidelines for each article the site publishes, are currently posted on the newspaper staff’s Instagram @robinsonknights. The top three articles will be published on RHStoday, and first place will win a $25 Chick-Fil-A gift card.

“The purpose of the contest is to interact with more Robinson students, as well as offer the opportunity to students to write something that is not the typical essay,” Oben said. “Journalism writing is very different than an English essay and I know that opinion writing or writing a review of your favorite album will pique a lot of people’s interest.”

The contest was first thought of by Online Managing Editor Jennifer Le (’23), who wanted a way to draw possible staffers to the class. Currently, there are 13 people in the class producing both the online newspaper RHStoday and the print newspaper Knight Writers; six of those are seniors.

“Journalism definitely isn’t the most popular elective at Robinson, probably because people aren’t familiar with what you do in the class… I want to fix this reputation we have as a class so that more people are willing to join,” Le said.

In addition to promoting the newspaper class, the contest serves as a way of informing students that there is a newspaper class at all. E-learning has made it more difficult to interact with Robinson’s newspaper as e-Learning students don’t have access to the physical copies of the newspaper around Robinson’s campus.

Students are allowed one submission each, and the link to submission is available on the @robinsonknights Instagram. The contest closes at midnight on April 30.

“I’m hoping (praying) that this contest gets students to see the fun side of newspaper and that we don’t just write news stories,” Le said. “Maybe this’ll encourage them to put journalism on their elective sheets, who knows.”