Throughout the school year, our online publication has managed to consistently post great content and achieve some of its primary goals.

Some of the main goals for this year were to post new stories onto the website at least twice a week and increase the amount of multimedia packages published. Our staff was successfully able to attain these goals and even managed to work with PBS to create more videos discussing topics that were rarely covered compared with previous years.   

Another one of our goals this year was to improve the design of the website and make it more user-friendly. We accomplished this by creating a new logo, adding more sidebar widgets, including direct links to our Twitter account, color pdfs of our print issues and themed Spotify playlists.

In a pursuit for better stories, we seemed to forget about some of the entertaining parts of the publication. This year we did not post any new quizzes onto the website. I wish I would’ve put more emphasis on these quizzes as a way to attract more viewers. Hopefully next year’s staff will take this into account and work on creating more entertaining content in the areas that this year’s was lacking.

Overall I’m very proud of all of the hard work and dedication that the staff put forth this year. We were able to create amazing high quality content including stories, photoslides and videos and we were able to make an impact on so many readers. This can be seen through the numerous awards we received, which include second place in the California All-Stars competition, second place at the Southern California Journalism Education Association state write-off competition, the Site Excellence and Multimedia Excellence badges given to us by School Newspapers Online (SNO) and we were recently nominated for the Los Angeles Press Club’s Best News Website.

Although the online publication wasn’t perfect, I couldn’t be happier with the end result. I’m so honored to have been able to be a part of this fantastic publication.