About

The Berkeley High Jacket is the student newspaper of Berkeley High School. The 16-page paper is published every other Friday throughout the school year and serves more than 3,200 Berkeley High students, as well as the broader Berkeley community. The paper’s five sections are News, Opinion, Features, Entertainment, and Sports. Beginning this fall the Jacket also publishes online video and multimedia content to its website.

The Jacket is entirely student-operated and is put together by more than 70 student editors, writers, photographers, illustrators and videographers. Staff members are enrolled in the Jacket class, which meets Mondays at 9 and every other Wednesday at lunchtime.

From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, the paper was printed daily in the school’s own print shop. In the late 1990s reporters Megan Greenwell and Iliana Montauk broke a story involving a local Berkeley business owner who was importing young women from India for sex trafficking. Their story was widely syndicated and the exposure resulted in criminal prosecution. In 2000, the Jacket staff became the first-ever non-professional winner of the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists’ Journalist of the Year award.

In the 2009-2010 year Evan Cohen and Connor Nielsen recreated the Jacket website from scratch. The new website allowed a wider audience for offered in the paper, as well as the addition of Multimedia pages that feature video segments. On March 19th, 2010, the paper received the Golden Crown Award for the Jacket Online from The Columbia Scholastic Press Association, "the highest award given to a student publication by the Association," and continues to win more Crown Awards.