ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Here I pose for a photo with eight other editors in Harker Journalism who represented our publications to prospective parents during Harker’s Open House on Nov. 3, 2019. Photo by Ellen Austin
A newspaper exists for its readers, and we constantly look for better ways to reach and serve our audience. As editor in chief, I have increased our engagement with our school community by overseeing our newspaper’s distribution, encouraging feedback from our audience and incorporating journalists’ work into school meetings and outreach events, like the Open House shown above.
THE WINGED POST’S REACH
• 7 issues per year
• 16 to 20 pages per issue
• 1,200+ copies distributed per issue
• 800+ students
• 100+ faculty
• 150 copies mailed to alumni
• 150 copies delivered to middle and lower schools
HARKER AQUILA’S REACH
From Aug. 15, 2019 to March 12, 2020, our online site Harker Aquila has had:
• 85,721 sessions
• 197,265 page views
• 457,973 users
• 57,138 new users
OUTREACH
SCHOOL MEETINGS
My co-editors in chief and I use weekly school meetings to interact with the school community and encourage their engagement with our publications. In past meetings, I have announced new journalism program initiatives, like making our newspaper 100 percent biodegradable, encouraged participation in our surveys and made weekly slideshows showcasing our staff’s photos of campus life.
For more on school meetings, visit Leadership & Team-Building and “Around Campus” in Multimedia Broadcast.
BACK TO SCHOOL DAY
To increase Harker parents’ engagement with our publications, I designed a Harker Journalism flyer and photo collage poster to be used on Back to School Day, when parents come to sit in on classes and meet teachers. To represent our publications and highlight our role in the school community, I collected photos taken by staff members across all of our publications and made sure to feature a diversity of grade levels, genders, school groups, events and photographers’ work. On the half-page flyer we handed out to parents, I directed people to our online site and social media outlets.
See the flyer below and the poster to the right.
INVITING SPEAKERS
When I first started covering national politics, I felt intimidated by all the professional reporters working alongside me. However, I soon realized that these were great opportunities for not only me but also the entire program to learn from experienced journalists. I began to strike up conversations with these journalists, ask them questions about their craft and reach out to them with questions that my reporters had. Reuters photographer Stephen Lam and Bay Area News Group housing reporter Marisa Kendall even accepted my invitations to speak to the journalism staff, sharing their professional experiences and advice for student-journalists.
A NEW LOOK
When I was the news editor of the Winged Post and Harker Aquila during my junior year, our staff decided to make a few fundamental changes to the “look” of our paper based on feedback we had heard from our school community. After the second issue of the Winged Post that year, we committed to a redesign.
We rebranded our front pages to implement article teasers on the top left and a new, kerned flag on the top right. Perhaps our most significant change was to change our paper’s page size from broadsheet pages to smaller tabloid pages, creating a more modern look. We reduced the number of news briefs in our paper, opting instead to go deeper in our coverage and take more unique angles.
With this redesign, we were able to improve the quality of our stories and let our graphics shine. We featured bolder dominants with more eye-catching color, used far more illustrations and data visualization and allowed ourselves to focus on fewer but more in-depth stories.
See front pages from before and after the redesign below.
INCREASING INTERACTION
AUDIENCE’s experience
When a new issue of the Winged Post is released, staff members from across publications rally to distribute newspapers to students, faculty and parents. At the same time our community races to get a copy of the latest issue.
From our publication’s experience, the opinions section tends to be the most popular, as students and faculty like hearing the unique thoughts of people in the community. As such, we make sure to polish our editorials and diversify the voices we feature.
We also find that our audience looks to our publication for unique angles and local perspectives. What separates the Winged Post from other publications such as the New York Times or even the San Jose Mercury News is our ability to localize issues specifically not only to California or the Bay Area, but to this school and its community.
We also strive to increase engagement with our publications by following up with our sources and providing them links to published articles. An example of an email I received from a source when I sent her the article link is pictured below.
We often receive feedback from our readers in person and over email. For example, after the release of our first issue this year, we heard from a debate teacher that he dedicated an entire class period to discussing our editorial on gun control following the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting. Hover over the images below and to the right for more examples (click to enlarge).
EDITORS’ NOTES
One way that my co-editor in chief and I increase transparency and interaction with our readers is by publishing editors’ notes. For more on editors’ notes, visit Leadership & Team-Building.
SOCIAL MEDIA
With more and more students and teachers getting their news through social media, we decided to meet our readers where they are. To expand our reach, we began utilizing social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook more and more to promote our stories and photos – thus funneling an increasing number of viewers to our online site.
The Winged Post has also found that social media is a fantastic way to garner responses to all-school surveys. For a survey on housing and commute, I worked with our social media managers to post a call for responses on our Instagram story, since I know our viewers often engage with us on that platform. The survey received a total of 284 student responses, comprising nearly 40 percent of the student body, the most we have ever received for a Winged Post survey.
Hover over the images below for more detailed descriptions.
FEEDBACK
After each print date, we gather feedback from the student body and review strengths and weaknesses of the issue. We use this reflection to constantly improve with each new issue.
For example, a lot of the feedback we got for Issue 2 this school year pointed out gaps in our coverage and a lack of school community voices on our front page. For the next issue, we took extra steps to brainstorm gaps in our on-campus coverage and included more briefs on school events that we did not have space to devote full articles to. We put greater emphasis on localizing our stories and featured many more quotes and photos of school community members in our next front page.
See notes we compiled on the strengths and weaknesses of Issue 2 based on community feedback.
FOCUS GROUPS
In my junior year, after the release of our second issue, our adviser invited a focus group of school librarians to conduct a close reading of our content. What they found was startling. A large proportion of the data and information cited in our articles that issue was unattributed. Many of our articles contained fewer than our quota of three interviews. Upon hearing the focus group members’ feedback, editors including myself addressed their concerns by initiating conversations with our reporters for the next issue and stressing the importance of sourcing and attribution. We continue to refer back to our notes from this focus group to improve our sourcing and overall coverage. We have also drafted plans for another focus group consisting of Harker students.