One month into the new school year, we are already looking ahead to the timely, accurate and relevant content The Pearl Post staff will produce this year.
Among the new changes of the 2023-2024 school year is the return to a six-period schedule. The shift has allowed our staff to increase to 23 enthusiastic student journalists, our largest staff since the return to in-person learning in 2021. On the other hand, six periods in one school day means shorter 60-minute periods compared to 90-minute periods from the 4×4 schedule. Our goal is to utilize every minute to the best of our ability through efficient communication and responsible time management.
Similar to last year, our staff is currently split into two classes due to Career Technical Education class requirements, with most of the new members in one period and most of the returning members in another. This makes our work flow a lot slower because of how difficult it is to communicate with the entire staff. To make communication smoother and easier, we will continue to use Slack for messaging and sending updates about assignments. We will also hold editor meetings every other week during lunch to discuss monthly content and bi-monthly magazine issues.
Our primary concern is the morale of those on staff. One of our main goals is that each staff member feels valued and appreciated for the work they submit for the publication. It is our strong belief that if staff members are dignified, the productivity of the publication will increase and the environment of the newsroom will brighten. We will reach this goal by consistently respecting the views and efforts of our fellow staff members while regularly scheduling staff meetings during lunchtime to form strong bonds with all on staff.
We are also resolved to meet the high bar set by past staffs. During the 65th Los Angeles Press Club SoCal Journalism Awards gala on June 25, The Pearl Post received third place awards in Best High School News Website and Best High School Newspaper for our June 2022 print issue. Two current editors are finalists in the Blog and Multimedia News Story categories of the National Scholastic Press Association Individual Awards for content produced this spring.
For the past two years, our staff has been effective in consistently brainstorming and producing online content despite our small numbers. This year, with an even stronger force, we hope to keep up that consistency with new website content at least three days a week. Another goal is to increase our audience engagement by redesigning our website with fresh visuals and styles. We hope to grab the attention of our audience by taking advantage of all the features available to us such as polls, infoboxes and more.
Continuing The Pearl Post’s trend of stellar content production in the print department, we plan to produce at least four issues of our print newsmagazine. Implementing tips from summer design workshops, we will redesign aspects of the magazine to allow for greater usage of photos and infographics on each page. We will also focus on designing magazine spreads to be creative and fun, drawing the attention of readers.
Additionally, we hope to increase our engagement on social media platforms with our main priority being Instagram. We plan to engage with our social media audience by posting entertaining videos, fun light-hearted polls and interacting with comments. Since social media has become a huge outlet for news, we want to expand our reach on apps that many teenagers are using today so they can stay updated with events happening in our community.
As we look forward to the rest of the school year, we are determined to meet our goals by working efficiently and productively. We are deeply committed to our roles as student journalists and will dedicate ourselves to producing some amazing content this year.
