Continuing with an ever-growing staff, we start this year with over 20 members, a huge leap from our immediate post-pandemic levels.
As in years past, The Pearl Post is split into two classes due to Career Technical Education class requirements. New members are in third period, returning members, all of whom are editors, are in sixth. Our goal for this year is to ensure frequent communication and forming bonds between both classes, despite the different periods. We aim to utilize Slack, a communication platform, more actively than we ever have before, by posting end-of-day announcements to achieve this goal.
This year, we want to restart Quill and Scroll, the newspaper-run club. We find that this club is able to encourage team bonding among our staff and helps promote our student media to interested students with photography and writing opportunities. Both of us honed our journalistic skills over the summer through workshops and an internship, so we are excited to help both our staff and any prospective members in developing theirs.
Additionally, we want to continue posting about three times a week to ensure frequent updates to our website and increase student engagement. We also want to continue regularly posting on social media to help our audience stay updated and increase student engagement.
Our primary concern for this year is ensuring that our bi-monthly magazine is published on time. Last year, we only had four printed magazines, with one being online-only. This year, we want to ensure that this is not the case and prevent our magazines from being online-only.
Another concern is the impending district-wide phone ban. As of now, no details have been released or discussed on providing exceptions to student programs that heavily use phones, like our student media. Our reporting – from videos to interviews – all require our phones to aid us. By banning phones, the district will cause immense harm to our workflow and informing people of news taking place on campus.
Last year, we also had a very accomplished staff. Many of our members received at least one Best of SNO award, a trend we hope to continue. We also saw great success during the 2024 Fall National High School Journalism Convention winning multiple awards such as Best High School News Website and Best High School Newspaper.
As we begin this year, our first issue will cover the upcoming elections, both nationally and locally. We also aim to increase our video output this year by incorporating them into more story packages, as well as for student engagement. In addition, we want to aim to consistently publish our publication’s podcast, Room 22, and plan on uploading at least one episode a month to accomplish this.
Overall, we believe that this year will be productive and successful. Our staff is energized for the new year and excited to continue their work as student journalists.
