On July 31, 2017, the new school year started, which also meant a new journalism team. As individuals, we came together, to try to create something bigger than ourselves. We lost some students, but we gained a few too, and the ones who stayed and worked hard on this paper are the reason why we are ending this semester with at least some type of success.
We spent the first month of the semester trying to figure out what we wanted out of this newspaper. Things like what we wanted to write about, how we wanted to conduct interviews, what our website would look like, all of these were the foundation for this class and what we wanted out of. The copy editor for the Talon says that our main goal was, “To spread awareness for the news and help students with a passion for writing and journalism have an outlet for that.”After this, we created a brand new website (which is what you’re reading this on right now) in hopes to make us seem more professional. We tried to think of ways to get our peers to actually want to read this paper—-trust me, it’s not an easy task.
We somewhat achieved our goal of getting people to read the newspaper. With 100+ people viewing our website each week, and when it came time to sell actual hard-copy newspapers, we sold around 100 copies. In order to achieve this, we created a survey and asked over 200 students what they wanted out of this paper and what they wanted to read about. Although some students reacted to this negatively, many students responded seriously and it has come to fruition with at least some student response and support.
We have made many efforts trying to get student support. For example, we set up a brand new Instagram account to reach out to students outside of school and to keep them informed on the school newspaper.We have accumulated over 100 followers, but we can always use another follower (follow us @hhsthetalon)! Although this has been working, next semester will lead to new opportunities to reach out to students, but we’ll leave that to next semester’s students.
Overall, we feel like there has been a lot of success out of this semester, but we know there can always be more room for growth. We still have to get more students to read the newspaper, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll think about joining our class. We currently have 11 students right now, and we’ll need a lot more to keep up our success streak. If more students start reading the paper, more kids will want to come write for the paper, and then our school’s journalism program can become even more successful. We can attribute all of our success to our teacher, Dr. George, for continually keeping us motivated to find the real news, but to also always make our deadlines. We hope that next semester holds more success than we have had and that our newspaper can become a huge success that makes our school a great environment for journalists like ourselves. For now, keep reading The Talon, we’ll always have new stories for our viewers, and maybe think about joining journalism next semester!
Read more of our articles here: http://hillgrovethetalon.weebly.com
We spent the first month of the semester trying to figure out what we wanted out of this newspaper. Things like what we wanted to write about, how we wanted to conduct interviews, what our website would look like, all of these were the foundation for this class and what we wanted out of. The copy editor for the Talon says that our main goal was, “To spread awareness for the news and help students with a passion for writing and journalism have an outlet for that.”After this, we created a brand new website (which is what you’re reading this on right now) in hopes to make us seem more professional. We tried to think of ways to get our peers to actually want to read this paper—-trust me, it’s not an easy task.
We somewhat achieved our goal of getting people to read the newspaper. With 100+ people viewing our website each week, and when it came time to sell actual hard-copy newspapers, we sold around 100 copies. In order to achieve this, we created a survey and asked over 200 students what they wanted out of this paper and what they wanted to read about. Although some students reacted to this negatively, many students responded seriously and it has come to fruition with at least some student response and support.
We have made many efforts trying to get student support. For example, we set up a brand new Instagram account to reach out to students outside of school and to keep them informed on the school newspaper.We have accumulated over 100 followers, but we can always use another follower (follow us @hhsthetalon)! Although this has been working, next semester will lead to new opportunities to reach out to students, but we’ll leave that to next semester’s students.
Overall, we feel like there has been a lot of success out of this semester, but we know there can always be more room for growth. We still have to get more students to read the newspaper, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll think about joining our class. We currently have 11 students right now, and we’ll need a lot more to keep up our success streak. If more students start reading the paper, more kids will want to come write for the paper, and then our school’s journalism program can become even more successful. We can attribute all of our success to our teacher, Dr. George, for continually keeping us motivated to find the real news, but to also always make our deadlines. We hope that next semester holds more success than we have had and that our newspaper can become a huge success that makes our school a great environment for journalists like ourselves. For now, keep reading The Talon, we’ll always have new stories for our viewers, and maybe think about joining journalism next semester!
Read more of our articles here: http://hillgrovethetalon.weebly.com