Top prize for a Packet student correspondent
Emily Laermer, a senior at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South, has been named the 2007 New Jersey High School Journalist of the Year by the Garden State Scholastic Press Association and will receive the Bernard Kilgore Memorial Scholarship from the New Jersey Newspaper Foundation.
She will receive the $5,000 scholarship when she begins college in September at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Emily also has been entered in the 2007 Journalism Education Association’s competition for the National High School Journalist of the Year.
She will be honored by the New Jersey Newspaper Federation at the New Jersey Press Association’s editorial awards banquet on Thursday in Trenton.
She is the daughter of Stuart and Caryn Laermer of West Windsor.
She also is a youth correspondent for The Princeton Packet and also provides proofreading assistance.
Emily volunteered to work for her high school newspaper, The Pirate’s Eye, following an ankle injury her freshman year which prevented her from participating in sports.
In her essay submitted for the scholarship, she wrote, "I traded in timed sprints for creative layouts, shooting drills for board of education meetings, and dribbling practice for PhotoShop."
She added, "I was able to interact with many individuals I never imagined meeting, including professional newspaper reporters, local government officials, as well as former President Bill Clinton, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, actress Meryl Streep and ‘X-Men’ and ‘Superman Returns’ director Bryan Singer."
Fourteen New Jersey high school students were nominated by their high school journalism teachers for the 2007 Kilgore Scholarship competition.
Three New Jersey newspaper editors evaluated the applications: Jim Flachsenhaar of the Courier News, Tom Curran of The Star-Ledger and Hank Kalet of the Cranbury Press and South Brunswick Post.
The Princeton Packet and family and friends of the late Bernard Kilgore, former chairman of the board of Dow Jones and Co. Inc., created the memorial scholarship fund with the New Jersey Press Foundation in 2000 when Mr. Kilgore was named Business Journalist of the 20th Century.