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Marketing
Curriculum Night
In the spring semester, my school hosts a curriculum night event to introduce incoming freshman to our campus' elective options. In order to gain more interest in our journalism program, I attended the event to showcase how newspaper has not only improved my writing and communications skills, but opened me up to many opportunities in leadership and community outreach.
By talking one-on-one with aspiring staffers, I was able to encourage more students to join our staff and spread their interest among their friends and social circles. Handing out our latest issue of the paper at the event also gave students and parents an example of the work we do in newspaper, expanding not only our potential staff, but readers.
Starting next year, our school will be implementing a new curriculum path called the Academy of Media and Communication. Although I will no longer be a student when this begins, I still wanted to introduce the new classes, such as Photojournalism and Foundations of Journalism to incoming student to encourage others to register for classes that could lead to enrollment on the newspaper staff.
On the left I've included the pamphlets I handed out at the event, one outlining the paths students can take to get on either newspaper or yearbook staffs, and one for students to apply to either staff.
Grow Your Vision
Instagram raffles
Instagram has been our most active social media account for several years, but for the first time ever, our staff held an Instagram raffle to boost followers and social media interactions. We required that students follow our Instagram (@hagertyjourn), like our post, and tag three friends. After a week, we put all qualifying students into a randomizer and selected five winners who won gift cards to Starbucks and Foxtail Coffee Inc.
We held the raffle three days before our first issue of the year came out. At the beginning of this year, our Instagram had approximately 1,348 followers. Now, we have over 1,800. With an increased Instagram following and new social media publicity, we gained more attention than in previous years and this is just one thing we have done to boost our following. The timing of the raffle was planned to increase viewership of our printed and digital issue, which proved successful.
Advertisement Sales
While our publication no longer has advertisements in our regular print issues, we sell spots in our annual senior issue to campus clubs, teams, and honor societies. To keep track of these sales, we create a Google Spreadsheet to record the club, club sponsor, advertisement price, and the ad's size. In addition to our senior issues' ads, I sold ads to a local chiropractic office in my first year on staff, which was put in our second-semester issues. By selling ads to local businesses and groups, we have been able to raise money for our publication and grow our audience.
To the left, you can see the advertisement that was included in our 2022 issues along with our senior advertisement spreadsheet.
Distribution posts
As seen in the Web and Social Media section, I began to use Instagram to promote the print issue of our paper and our website. By creating custom Instagram posts on the app Canva and in InDesign for my staffers’ stories, awards, and the print issues, I have increased our social media following and our website views. Increasing our audience through social media has allowed our website and print issues to create more buzz and gain more attention.
Highlighting our website is important, but so are the print issues. In addition to the print, we upload all of our issues to our website. By combining our print issues with our online media, we now have multiple ways for readers to view our writing, and social media has further grown that audience.
SNO Donations
Through our website organizations, Student Newspapers Online, we are able to access helpful resources, such as the fundraising tool. Two years ago, we implemented this function into our website, so under each story, the viewer has the ability to donate to our publication. This is an easy way for our publication to earn money as users may read a story they connect with or admire, which may inspire them to donate to our publication.
Campus Advertising
To raise awareness of our publication and our new Academy of Media and Communication, I worked with my adviser to make a list of classes that would likely have good writers (Honors and AP English, AP social studies courses, debate, creative writing, etc.) We sent students to bring flyers to these classes so more underclassmen would be encouraged to join newspaper.
In addition to this, I updated the board outside of our classroom with essential information about our newspaper, website, and yearbook. By listing socials and giving QR codes to our Smugmug, where students can purchase photos to fund the yearbook, more students can learn about our program.
Audience Engagement
Campus Polls
When researching for campus-based stories, our staff utilizes the poll feature on Instagram to gather statistics on campus opinions. In addition, I like to add a question box for followers to respond with their specific opinions or experiences in relation to the story topic. This allows us to get input from our peers on how important certain issues are held by students. Polls can range from serious topics such as mental health to more lighthearted subjects, such as "What is your favorite Thanksgiving dish?" No matter the topic of the story, it is important to get a sense of what our viewers experience and find interesting. The more votes we receive, the more accuracy we can have in our reporting. Scroll through to see some of our campus polls.
Print-to-Online
After receiving guidance from FSPA last year, our staff began to implement QR codes in our print to direct more readers to our website. For stories that may be too long to fully print, multimedia content, or to tease upcoming stories, QR codes bring more readers to our website and make our paper more interactive.
Click images to enlarge.
Social Media Posts
As mentioned in the Web and Social Media section, I aim to post all of our in-depth stories on our Instagram feed. By doing so, we attract more users to read our online stories. Whether a feature or a column, I organized our Instagram page at the beginning of the year by implementing the highlights feature. Through this, viewers can easily view specific types of content, whether it be podcasts, book reviews, or sports recaps.
Posting everyday on our website, Instagram, and X (Twitter) is no easy task. I led this new practice at the beginning of the year, but with lots of help and prompting, my staffers have began to use social media journalistically as well. Keeping track of our posts on our staff calendar and master-list helps our posts stay organized. Consistency and efficiency in posting allows our stories to have higher viewership and reach a wider audience.
Scroll below to see some of our daily Instagram posts.
Analytics
To get a better idea of what stories and posts do well on our site and social media, I will refer to SNO and Instagram Analytics.
On SNO, I can view where our website views have spiked, and from there, see what posts were uploaded on that day or in days prior. As seen in the screenshot below, we had a massive spike in website views on Sept. 19, 2023. Uncoincidentally, my staffer Isaiah uploaded his story, Will's World, on Sept. 18. His story was published on Best of SNO and showcased on their homepage, leading to our spike in views. From this, I see that viewers enjoy human interest stories and profiles, which we have now further implemented into our features section.
On Instagram, I use the professional dashboard to view the number of accounts we reached, account engagement, and increase in followers. Through analytics, I can also view how many shares, likes, and saves are made on all our posts. Our average number of views lies around 1,200 views per post. From this, I have learned that features and community stories perform higher than news, which is also supported by our SNO analytics.
Click to see some of our X posts.
Pop question
Twice a quarter, we feature a pop question on our website, often in relation to a current event in pop culture. Ranging from opinions on Thanksgiving dishes to The Eras Tour attendance, my print editor and I help compile a list of compelling questions that our audience will have an interest in. We then send staffers to different classrooms to gather students' opinions to include in the poll. Sometimes when gathering statistics it is beneficial to take count in person rather than on social media to reduce room for error in responses.
Click to see the latest pop question on our website's homepage.
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