Marketing and Audience Engagement
As a student publication, our reporting is strongly centered around our high school student audience. We are always working to ensure that our content is localized and relevant to our teenage audience. Additionally, we work to ensure that this content is also appealing to them in hopes to increase our audience engagement.
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During my time on staff, I have prioritized increasing student input on our publication and also worked to use my platform to spread awareness and information. Scroll below to see some examples of this.
Increasing Student Input
Last school year, we decided that the main coverage of the first issue of our magazine would be regarding vaping. This epidemic is an incredibly prominent problem among the younger generation and was definitely an issue within my school. As the special reports editor, this coverage went on my pages. As I was planning out the coverage, I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate student's voices. Vaping was obviously something that students weren't allowed to do, which made it particularly difficult to get interviews. I also thought that collecting data directly from our student population instead of generic data found online. I decided to create a poll that asked questions about vaping and allowed all students to anonymously take it.
While creating this poll, I wanted to ensure that my questions would provide me with the data necessary to create a strong infographic. These responses were completely anonymous, which is why I didn't provide a space for students to add a name and I made sure to specify that when I handed out the surveys.
Once it came time to distribute this survey, I quickly realized that it would be quite difficult for me to hand out the survey to my entire school by myself. Because of this, I came up with a system. I recruited all of the other editors on staff and asked for their help. After some thought, I decided that the best time to distribute this survey was during the 15 minutes after first period, which is time in our class schedule when students are able to eat breakfast before second period. I assigned each editor to hand out the survey to one classroom, which facilitated and sped up the process. This also made sure that every student had the opportunity to respond to the poll if they wanted to. This image shows which editor was going to each classroom so that I could keep track.
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This is the final infographic I created with the information from this survey. Click the image to see how it looked on my final spread.
Lastly, I created a script for the editor to follow when speaking to the class. I wanted to ensure that students had all the necessary information to understand why they were receiving the survey and how their data would be used. I also made sure to reiterate that they should not be writing their name on the survey since it was meant to be completely anonymous. I printed a copy of this script for every editor and gave it to them along with the surveys they needed for their respective classrooms.
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"The rise of stress among teens"
Our December 2019 issue of the magazine was set to be distributed right before finals week. Because of this, I felt that it was the perfect time to talk about stress. For this issue, I planned my coverage around the stress that students are under, especially during the end of a semester. For this issue, I decided to create another poll centered around stress.
This is the final infographic I created with the information from this survey. Click the image to see how it looked on my final spread.
Click here to view it on our website.
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Academic Impact of distance learning
While brainstorming for our first magazine issue of the 2020-21 school year, we decided to focus on the mental, emotional and academic impacts of distance learning. In the past school year, we had spent much time covering the COVID-19 specifically and we wanted to tackle the subject in a new way. Since we were completely virtual, I had to figure out a way to transition my traditional poll to an online version. I decided to use a google form because it was very user friendly and easily accessible to students. (It also conveniently made my life a lot easier since I no longer had to physically count each survey!)
This is the final infographic I created with the information from this survey. Click the image to see how it looked on my final spread.
Click here to view it on our website.
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With this poll, I aimed to find out the mental and academic impacts of distance learning on students so I had to ask a wide range of questions. I also made sure to limit the number of questions that I added to ensure that I don't bore the students. It was harder to get students to fill out the survey since I wasn't handing them the form face-to-face. Through in-person surveys in the 2019-20 school year, I would typically receive over 200 responses, which is over two-thirds of our entire student population. For the online form, I reached out students by posting on our publication's social media accounts and I asked my journalism advisor to post an update on our online grading platform Schoology, asking students to fill out the survey. I ended up receiving 81 responses out of about 270 students.
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To view this survey in its official website form, click here.
Mental/Emotional Impact of distance learning
For our second issue of the 2020-21 school year, I decided to focus my section's coverage on the mental and emotional impact of distance learning since we had explored the academic impacts in the previous issue. Below are the questions that I included in the google form survey. I made students aware of this survey by posting on my personal social media accounts as well as those for the publication. I also asked my advisor to post on our grading platform, Schoology, asking students to fill it out. I received 71 responses on this survey out of about 270 students.
Click on each image to enlarge it. Click here to view the published version of the google form.
This is the final infographic I created with the information from this survey. Click the image to see how it looked on my final spread.
Click here to view it on our website.
Promotion
A key way of promoting our student media and recruiting other students on campus is to highlight our staff's accomplishments. We also often feature the opportunities offered to students as a result of being on staff. We utilize social media to showcase our staff's achievements and different team-bonding activities we hold. Below are some samples of these social media posts.
Click on the icons below to browse our publication's social media platforms.
@ThePearlPost
@ThePearlPost
@ThePearlPost
Using my platform
In addition to our work and achievements being showcased on our official publication social media accounts, I have also aimed to consistently highlight our work on my personal social media accounts as well. Personally, I also enjoyed documenting my journey on the staff of my student publication through my accounts and in turn, building up my own personal branding. Below are some examples.
Fundraising
Although switching from a newspaper to a newsmagazine was a very exciting move for our staff, we were also very aware of the increase in cost we would experience due to this decision. We already had to make the difficult decision to cut the number of copies we printed from 400 to 300. To fundraise for this expense increase, our student media made sure to set up a booth at every school event to both sell yearbooks and ask people to sponsor our news publication by becoming a patron.
A group of students from our publication staff, including myself, were planning to attend the Columbia Scholastic Press Association high school journalism convention at New York in March 2020. As a staff we were really excited to attend this convention and broaden our journalistic knowledge in the Big Apple. To make the trip more affordable, our advisor set up a GoFundMe account as a way to raise money. I made sure to help spread the word by posting on my personal social media account. In total, we raised about $870. Due to the coronavirus, the convention was canceled and that money was used to pay off plane tickets we had already booked.
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Using our platform
As a student publication, we recognize and value the responsibility that comes with our social following. We often try to spread important and positive messages throughout our platforms. This helps us inform students of important current events and engage with them.
Leading up to the December 2019 Democratic debate, PBS Student Reporting Labs asked students to submit questions for the presidential candidates. My question was selected to be featured in the PBS NewsHour Dec. 18, 2019 episode, which streamed 43,011 times on YouTube. Skip to 01:16 to hear my question or click here!