The Garden State, there is much more to New Jersey than just being New York’s neighbor.

Without NJ, we wouldn’t have these common journalistic topics to write about:
1. Baseball (created in NJ)
2. Pro Basketball (first played in NJ)
3. College Football (first game: Rutgers vs Princeton)
4. Cheerleading (originated in NJ)
5. Music (phonograph created in NJ)
6. … And the electric guitar!
7. Miss America Pageant
8. Bon Jovi
9. Frank Sinatra
10. Bruce Springsteen
11. Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Alan Alda, Jack Nicholson, Dionne Warwick, the list goes on and on.

Places we read newspapers:
12. Diners (more than any other state)
13. Drive-in Movies (started in NJ)
14. Houses (more per square mile than any other state)
15. Anywhere with light (thanks to Thomas Edison’s lab in NJ)
16. Anywhere with air conditioning (invented in NJ)
17. Horse barns – more horses than Kentucky

What we can eat while reading, thanks to NJ:
18. Campbell Soup
19. TV dinners
20. Salt water taffy
21. Jersey produce
22. Sliders
23. Frozen custard
24. Pork roll / Taylor ham
25. Tomato pie
26. Yearbooks wouldn’t be able to use this theme:
27. Monopoly (based on streets of Atlantic City)

In NJ, we innovate newspapers and online publications through technology created in NJ:
28. Barcodes
29. LCD technology
30. Digital cellular

We fight for rights here:
31. First state to sign Bill of Rights
32. State with most battles during Revolutionary War
33. New Jersey Shield Law
34. New Voices Act of New Jersey

We value our great organizations:
35. The Garden State Scholastic Press Association
36. New Jersey Press Foundation
37. New Jersey Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists
38. New Jersey Press Association

We honor through our annual award to advisers, teachers and friends of scholastic journalism:
39. NJ Golden Quill Award

And through our two student scholarships:
40. Kilgore Scholarship ($5000)
41. Stevens Scholarship ($2,500)

We are centrally located:
42. Philadelphia Inquirer to the west, NY Times to the north, Baltimore Sun and Washington Post to the south

We have great college journalism programs and papers:
43. Princeton University Program in Media and Modernity
44. Rutgers University Journalism and Media Studies Department
45. The Daily Targum
46. Princeton Tiger Magazine
47. The University Press Club
48. The Signal of the College of New Jersey
49. Montclair State University School of Communication and Media

We have many stellar newspapers and magazines, from daily to weekly, local to national:
50. The Bergen Record
51. The Courier Post
52. Asbury Park Press
53. Burlington County Times
54. Catholic Star Herald
55. Cherry Hill Sun
56. The Hudson Reporter
57. The Jewish Standard
58. Atlantic City Press
59. The Trentonian
60. The Star-Ledger
61. NJ.com
62. The Press of Atlantic City
63. Modern Drummer Magazine
64. New Jersey Monthly
65. Weird NJ
66. Upstate
67. TAPIntos
68. Edible Jersey
69. New Jersey Farmer
70. The Express-Times
71. New Jersey Hills Media Group

Oh, and lots of TV and radio:
72. New Jersey 101.5
73. ABC Nightly News
74. WMBC-TV (Newton)
75. WWOR-TV (Secaucus)
76. News 12 New Jersey (Edison) especially Walt Kane
77. WNJS-TV (Trenton)

Many journalists, TV personalities and writers have roots in NJ, such as:
78. Daniel Pearl
79. Brian Williams
80. Mitch Albom
81. Anna Quindlen
82. Tom Murro
83. David Muir
84. Kevin Coughlin
85. Kelly Riipa
86. Wendy Williams
87. Bill Bowman
88. Jonathan Alter
89. Kenny Burns
90. Nancy Soloman
91. Josh Margolin
92. Clair Regan

And more…
93. Center for Cooperative Media: Stefanie Murray and Joe Amditis
94. Dow Jones News Fund including Heather Taylor
95. Jennifer Borg, one of the premier First Amendment attorneys in the nation
96. The Union Hotel in Flemington where the press called in their stories from the Lindbergh Kidnapping Trial (much of today’s kidnapping law and regulations on cameras in the courtroom come from this case)
97. T. Thomas Fortune House in Red Bank
98. We come together every fall for the GSSPA Fall Conference and often in the spring and summer as well.
99. Many of our members are either CJE or MJE and remain active in scholastic journalism after they retire.
100. We have student chapters and individuals making an impact on what can – and is – printed both online and in print.
101. We are a state on the rise for scholastic journalism – trust us: it wasn’t easy to narrow this down to 100. 🙂