History

The California Scholastic Press Association got its start in 1951 with the help of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst wanted his newspaper, the Los Angeles Examiner, to be the paper of record for prep sports in Southern California. So he asked track and field writer Ralph Alexander to find high school boys who could cover sports at their schools in exchange for meal money and a byline.

The boys were also invited to a journalism workshop at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. During the summer of 1951, they learned sports writing, photography and other journalism skills from Alexander and other Hearst journalists.

It was supposed to be a one-time deal. But Alexander and his wife, Millie, kept the program going. The workshop began admitting girls in 1965, and was renamed the California Scholastic Press Association in 1968.

More than seven decades later, professional journalists are still hosting a two-week workshop on California’s Central Coast.

The day before Alexander died in 1981, he summoned nine workshop graduates to his bedside and asked them to continue the CSPA. The group ran the workshop in the summer of 1982, and for decades after that, guiding the program through seismic changes in the news industry.

Though students no longer carry typewriters, and though online journalism and social media are now key parts of the program, the reporting and writing lessons at the heart of our curriculum have remained the same for decades.

Several workshop graduates have been honored as National High School Journalist of the Year. Many have gone on to prestigious news careers at publications that include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, Politico, CNN, NBC News and the Associated Press. Others shine in publishing, marketing, entertainment, television, politics, law, hospitality and other fields.