With a new staff in hand, the online publication of The Pearl Post is set to thrive with timely stories posted online at least three times a week.

An issue we have always encountered in the past is making sure to update the website with current information. Creating new polls, updating the sports scores and the breaking news ticker has become a higher priority as we constantly need to present topical news and videos.

We also hope to increase our presence on High School Insider, a forum hosted by the Los Angeles Times where high school students can post stories they’ve written. This allows our student journalists to get their work read by people from a multitude of different schools, expanding their audience.

For the past five years, The Pearl Post has worked on and off with PBS NewHour’s Student Reporting Labs, a program that works with students to create videos featuring stories pertaining to students’ communities; recently, they have been STEM-based. Maintaining our connection with PBS allows students to expand their audience, allowing the videos they produce to possibly be aired nationwide on PBS NewsHour.

By the end of the year, we hope to have increased our use of multimedia posts, including new ways of presenting stories and images, including interactive timelines like in our first special reports section this school year. Making more quizzes where people can pick a subject and will be given a show to binge watch, for example, is also a goal of ours. Providing Spotify playlists also allows viewers to bop to some cool jams.

With it only being the first month of the new school year, our staff has given us high hopes for the future.