WEB & SOCIAL MEDIA
One of my favorite things about our online newspaper is all of the interesting things we can do with it. It gives us so many opportunities to go beyond just words on a screen, and I love experimenting and discovering new things we can do. Social media is also fun to use to post updates, interact with our followers, and more.
STORY PAGE FORMAT
Using different SNO formats is a great way to make a story unique and can make publications way cooler. Because I've mastered playing around with these templates, I'll often format these templates for other writers when they ask.
CONSTITUTION DAY:
Another staff member was writing an article over student's first amendment rights while I was planning to do a feature article over the district's lawyer. So, we interviewed him together and put our stories together in a side by side template.
CHEER COACHES:
We had three staff members cover the three cheer coaches, so I put it all together into this grid format.
ABORTION:
We had two staff members who wanted to write abortion opinion pieces from both sides, but we wanted unbiased piece to publish with it. So, I took the opportunity to create a timeline of abortion law (also shown later in this section). then we put all of these elements together in a side-by-side article.
MARVEL REVIEWS:
Another staff member and I wanted to write reviews over Marvel's holiday releases, so I put them together in a side-by-side.
BREAKING UP TEXT IN OUR STORIES
We always require staff members to add in other elements to break up blocks of text, whether it's a related stories box, pull quote, poll, side bar, more photos, social media embed or anything else (I also touched on this in the editing section). Below are a few of my stories that used multiple elements, click on them for some more information and a link to the story.
VALENTINE'S MULTIMEDIA PACKAGE
I made this package with two other staff members and it contained a written component along with a video component and visuals. It took us weeks to put together, and we're proud of the way it turned out. To do this package, I videoed the interviews, and then someone else edited them together. I wrote all of the stories but one (I also talked about this in the Reporting and Writing section). I also made the design scheme and multimedia elements to go in such as the title photos for each person, extra photos, collages, graphs, and pull quotes (I went more in-depth into this in the design section). It all came together for a cohesive package.
There's a large amount of writing in the story (around 3500 words), so I utilized images and designs to break up the text and keep it interesting.
The whole package earned a national Best of SNO award.
COUNTDOWN
For years, we've wanted to utilize a countdown on our site. However, we couldn't get it to work on SNO. Until one day, I found a great website called Flourish where I could easily create a countdown and simply embed it. I made one and worked with another staff member to get it on our front page. Now, it sits there permanently counting down until the next break, long weekend, or any other exciting event in the district.
The countdown was a total hit with our audience with many staff members sharing stories of their teachers pulling up our website to show the days until winter break.
INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS
My adviser and I have always wanted to use Knightlab interactive elements in our stories to make our articles much more interesting. This year, I finally got to use it.
I first made a timeline to show the recent abortion legislation in our state to go along with two op-eds by other staff members. Then, I created a fun winter guide where I created a map to show great holiday areas near us. I also used the website, Flourish, to show information in a more interesting way in the winter guide. The winter guide got some attention on Facebook after my adviser posted about it.
INSTAGRAM REEL
Just to have some fun, we decided to film an Instagram Reel that introduced our five Editorial Board members. Within a day, it got almost 5,000 views, which was much higher than our normal social media insights. We got more page views that same day as well, and we can assume it was from the reel.
USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO GET QUOTES
Asking for quotes on our social media is an effective way to get diverse quotes and opinions for news articles. As we cover heated topics around the school, we always ask for quotes to allow people to interact with our social media and anticipate upcoming articles.
Our school updated our dress code policy this year, so I asked for quotes on social media and got some great responses. The story eventually was trending with about 800 views because it was such a hot topic. You can read the story here.
