Student Journalists with DPNews Work Overtime to Prep for Success

It’s a bright and sunny Saturday morning in Goleta, the type of weekend most teenagers might spend sleeping in or making plans with their friends. But here at Dos Pueblos High School, a group of student journalists are spending their free day at school — not for Saturday school or detention — but to prepare for an upcoming video production competition held at the Student National Television (STN) convention in Tampa Bay, Florida.

These dedicated students are part of the school’s award-winning DPMedia program, made up of the school’s yearbook staff, Charger Account newspaper, and the entirely student-run broadcast DPNews. It’s a program started by adviser John Dent more than 20 years ago, which has since expanded from a small classroom to the state-of-the-art 14,000 square-foot Virgil Elings Media Arts and Communications Center opened on campus in 2024. 

In recent years, Dent and fellow program adviser Doug Caines have created a culture of success that turned DPMedia into one of the premier student-run media programs in the country. After years of attending and competing at annual conferences with thousands of other student journalists, DPNews has now become a consistent award-winner, earning recognition as one of the top broadcast shows with individual prizes in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

A quick tour around the media arts center makes it clear why DPMedia students have a leg up on the rest of the competition. The students who write, edit, and produce the daily news show and monthly magazine have access to high-end cameras, anchor desks, teleprompters, editing bays, podcast rooms, and a control room with enough blinking lights and buttons to rival the cockpit of a fighter jet.

Camila Ronchietto, a senior who has been with DPMedia throughout her high school career, says the huge space and all the equipment offer the students “creative freedom” to produce content that interests them while teaching skills that can be translated into careers in television, film, or online content creation.

“Without this whole program, I don’t think I would have ever found what I wanted to do when I’m older,” Ronchietto said. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so passionate about something. I love photography and I do a lot of outside things, and I would have never done that without being introduced to this program. It’s meant so much in leading me to that pathway of being ready to take on a major for film production and being ready to be someone in that role.” 

A group of 38 DPMedia students are getting ready to head to this year’s STN convention, which will take place over three days in Tampa Bay Florida from February 27 to March 3. During the annual convention, the Dos Pueblos students will compete in a stress-inducing “Crazy Eights” competition, where teams must plan, shoot, and edit an entire video project in under eight hours. In recent years, the DPMedia team has emerged as a top contender in the competition.

The team takes competition prep seriously. For the past several weekends, students have shown up to recreate the STN hustle at home. This includes breaking up into teams to produce a short video on a tight deadline, without the use of all their usual bells and whistles. It’s part of the DPNews secret to success, and forces the team to be creative under restricted circumstances.

“That’s why we’re not taking advantage of all this amazing stuff,” Dent says.”Because when we go to Tampa Bay, they won’t get any of this. None of these fancy teleprompters, none of this stuff will come with us.”

On practice day, students arrive at 9 a.m and are given a prompt for the theme for the day’s assignment. Today, the theme is “making a difference.” Within the first hour, the teams already have an idea of what type of direction they will take their project. This first idea almost always hits a snag and forces the teams to adjust — another way to teach the students to work on the fly.

While the students run around gathering video in the early part of the day, Dent is nearby to watch or to help drive the teams out to a new location, but he is careful not to step in and solve any problems for them.

“We certainly want to be there, but also, we find it so much more valuable when they are left to figure it out,” Dent said. “And I constantly remind them: Don’t make your story. Tell other people’s stories. The stories are out there, and if it changes along the way, go with it. Don’t try and morph it into what you think it should be.”

Mychal Nuno, a senior who is the executive producer for DPNews’ daily broadcast, said he is thankful for Dent and Caines’s approach to advising without “taking the reins” from the student producers. “They let us take control of the whole show, while advising us and pointing us in the right directions,” Nuno said. “I feel like I’m so ready for that stressful environment, because that’s what happens every day here with our daily show.”

Nuno said the entire team benefits from coming in during their weekend time to practice. “Seeing each other make this commitment, we just respect each other a significant amount because of what we do on these weekends,” Nuno said.

The annual trip is entirely funded through donations, which help cover the costs of travel, lodging, and registration for the group of nearly 40. DPMedia has raised $41,000 toward its goal of $57,400 for this year’s STN convention, and donations are still being collected through the program’s page on GiveLively.org.

Check out the following links to view videos created by DPMedia students during this year’s STN practice sessions, and videos created for last year’s STN competition in Tampa Bay: 2026 practice Short Documentary; 2026 practice Morning Show; 2025 Crazy Eights competition Morning Show; and 2025 First-Place winner for Man on the Street video.