Web and Social Media
I love the feeling of turning the pages of a printed newspaper as much as anyone. But these days, news spreads too fast for us to solely rely on ink and paper. The majority of content goes on our website, hhsblueprint.com, which I ensure is updated daily. Using the site in addition to various social media accounts, I can better engage with a modern teenage audience while maintaining the same goals of reliable information distribution that newspapers always have.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Until my senior year of high school, the closest thing I'd ever had to social media was a (largely inactive) Goodreads account. However, I understand the importance of being well-versed in the form of communication used by most of our intended audience, and reaching people through social media allows us to deliver news most effectively. I've taken time to familiarize myself with the operations of Instagram, and I regularly create social media posts to highlight our newspaper. There are two main categories of posts that I make:
1. Posts highlighting a specific story and directing people to read it.
2. Fun posts updating viewers on the general state of our paper.
The first kind directly leads people to look at our website, and allows us to showcase stories that we're especially proud of, or those that might have a high appeal to student readers. The second category improves our relationship with the public, and ensures that our paper is on people's minds when they look through their feed. Any kinds of posts over Instagram encourage interaction with us, and boosts our presence in students' everyday lives.
You can see some of my Instagram posts below, along with the caption I posted them with!
CAPTION: On Jan. 1, the final episode of "Stranger Things" took the nation by storm. Reviews for the fifth season and finale were incredibly polarized, with some finding it a satisfying conclusion and others finding it a massive letdown.
Two BluePrint writers, Tess Frey and Chloe Snyder, both fans of the show, share their opinions in a joint article. Does the finale deserve a "thumbs rightside up" or a "thumbs upside down"?
Check out the article by going to the link in our bio and looking for "Stranger Things 5: Absolute flop or best season yet?" in the Opinions section!
CAPTION: Curious about the newspaper statistics from the last year? We've compiled all that beautiful data into a couple slides!
Happy winter break! The BluePrint will begin posting stories again on Jan. 6.
Click the white arrows to the right and left of the images to view more pages of the post.
CAPTION: The Oviedo Mall, once filled with name-brand stores, has taken on a vastly different role in the community. Now home to small businesses and frequent events, the mall is changing but still present. Read more about this by clicking the link in our bio and looking for "Oviedo Mall: Dead or alive?" in the Features section!
CAPTION: On Jan. 19, the Oviedo Citizens In Action put together a parade and a Fun Day in the Park at Oviedo on the Park to honor the legacy of Dr. King. The event featured music, awards and local organizations, with citizens coming together to celebrate and educate themselves of Dr. King's footprint on society.
Read more about this event by going to hhsblueprint.com and looking for "Celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr" in the News category!
YouTube
We post all of our videos and podcasts on YouTube in order to embed them in story posts on our website, but our YouTube channel has garnered quite a bit of attention on its own! Our account, @hagertyjourn960, has 460 subscribers, and one of the videos I posted has over 125K views.
During my third year on staff, I decided to organize our videos into playlists, since many people were creating videos and podcasts as their recurring content. This allows viewers to easily find more content if they enjoy one episode of a recurring piece.
WEBSITE ELEMENTS
Not only does every story that we write go up on our website, we post videos, podcasts, photo galleries and more. The website composes the bulk of our media output, and I've taken advantage of the format to include interactive elements and multimedia.
With feedback from FSPA evaluations, we made adjustments to our website layout this year, and there are many elements we've implemented that need regular updating.
We added a scoreboard at the bottom of our website that shows recent scores and upcoming games. (We also moved the sports section to the bottom of the website so that it went along with this.) One of our new staffers, Grace, is responsible for updating this as her recurring content grade.
To support our fellow Academy of Media and Communications program, we built in a category on our website that displays the latest videos from TV production. I check their channel weekly, see what's new, and create a story post with the video embedded!
Story Swap is an exchange between us and other scholastic and independent papers in the area. We link to their stories so that students can get more information from a broader area, especially since many of these organizations have already written awesome stories on big issues.
Our editors last year first created the poll widget on our website, but I've continued to update it. It provides a fun way for students to interact with the site, and since I create a new poll every one or two weeks, there tends to be new content every time the average viewer opens the website.
Every time we release a print issue, we upload it to the website. Usually this either falls on me or the print editor, Isabella. We already make all of the pages into PDFs when we design our print issues, and making them into interactive flipbooks goes a long way toward making the site more fun.
STORY FORMATTING
To keep our website interesting, we make use of many different kinds of story layouts. From adding section titles to a long story to linking related stories to writing reviews in long form blocks, we are able to add visual interest just through the way that the text is formatted. You can get really creative with these too! I like to design my layouts to match the topic of the article I'm writing, or choose section titles that go along with the theme.
You can see some of my work with different formats below! Click on the buttons to see the full story.
For this article about libraries, I broke the story up into "chapters."
For this story about alternative music, I used song lyrics from popular alt bands as section titles.
I used a Long-Form Format for this series of reviews of holiday sitcom episodes. I sorted them into colorful blocks, and then used headings to separate each individual episode.
This story was an opinion, but Grace, another writer on staff, was writing a sports story on the same topic, so we linked the two together as related stories. I also used a text box to add in statistics related to the story.
This news story about a choir concert incorporated photos from the event throughout, and included both a video and a photo gallery.
MULTIMEDIA
Let's face it: the attention span of our target audience is...less than optimal for long, text-heavy stories. To break them up, we incorporate videos, podcasts, photo galleries and more into our stories. These provide some relief from large blocks of text, and give our readers a different way to interact with the content on our site.
During my first year on staff, I co-hosted a comedic podcast called "It's the Little Things," where Holly (our current online editor) and I chatted about minor inconveniences and the small events in our daily lives. This podcast ran for a total of eight episodes, all of which I edited and uploaded to SoundCloud. While doing this, I learned a lot about editing with Adobe Audition, and creating entertaining and funny content using only audio. For our episode on swearing, I even wrote a satirical song, which we sang together while I played guitar. (These days, we use YouTube for podcasts, but the same principles of uploading and embedding still apply.) This was one of the first consistent recurring pieces of multimedia content that we had on the website, and for much of our audience, it added an unexpected way to interact with the site.
INTERACTIVE SIDEBARS
For every big "Enhanced" story and even many smaller ones that could use a bit of extra information or flair, we create a virtual sidebar. For most of mine, I use the site Genially, which lets me design interactive pieces that I can embed in stories. These sidebars are eye-catching and can prevent students from losing focus while reading the story, since they break up large chunks of text and make the post more exciting.
I wrote this story (click the colorful text to read) my sophomore year on the removal of pride flags from the band and theater classrooms. The story itself was over 900 words and just covered the current issue without diving into any background information. I created three sidebars for this story. One gave historical context about pride flags, one included quotes from students about their significance, and one broke down the school board policy that was being applied to ban them. People who were curious or unfamiliar with why this was such a big deal could get helpful information, and people who were just viewing the story normally perceived it as shorter and easier to read.
For this story on transfer culture in high school sports, I noticed that there were a lot of confusing rules relating to transfers. Determining what was allowed or banned could be difficult for some students, so I wanted to lay out the most important rules in a sort of reference sheet. This sidebar is fairly simple, but it gives accurate and relevant information, and links to sources where students can learn more.
I created this for a story about the long-term effects that COVID-19 and the resulting quarantine had on students' academic performance and social and psychological development. It has a lot of information about a lot of different categories, much of it interactive. If you hover your mouse over any of the three sticky notes in the second column from the top, a tab pops up that provides more insight into that category. If you click on the plus sign in the pink circle in the last section, it gives you information about the data that I found, how I analyzed it, and why it was relevant. Even the simple animations in this sidebar make it more visually appealing and entertaining, which helps us out in our goal of getting students to stay on our website and enjoy reading the content.
Naturally I would create my favorite sidebar ever for one of my favorite stories ever! This article explored the role of libraries in modern society, and the experiences of students who frequented our local branch. One of my favorite interview tricks is to ask people a question that won't provide me with much necessary information, but will get them excited to talk. In this case, interviewing book lovers, I asked for their favorite book (or books), and what they would recommend to others. I ended up putting their responses into an interactive sidebar. Click on the yellow arrows in the bottom corners to see the student and librarian recommendations, and then click on each book to see a window with more information. In that window, you can click a link to the publisher's website or click a quote icon/person icon to learn about the recommender or why they liked it.
While covering a local school board election, I interviewed Dr. Robin Dehlinger, a newly elected member of the board. She spoke a lot, and outlined many parts of her platform, so I decided to break it down into her responses to the issues that students found most pressing. I used stock images and built-in shapes and graphics from Genially to create my own design rather than modifying a premade format. Click on the speech bubbles with ellipses to read quotes about each area of her policy!
This story explored interpersonal incidents and the systems in place to resolve serious conflicts between students. This sidebar shows the kind of "detective work" that administrators have to go through when determining what actually happened and whether the school should take action. Click on any of the "+ INFO" boxes to read what the dean said about that step in the process!
This quiz, attached to a story about a major heat wave, lets students test their knowledge of heat illness. I've found that quizzes are a really good way to absorb information (since you're likely to remember getting something correct or incorrect), and it can also alert readers if they're missing important knowledge. While the rest of the article is informative and interesting, athletes should remember these pieces of information above all else, since being able to spot signs of heatstroke can allow them to help their teammates in these situations.