Web & Social Media
Our website has a variety of features we can use to design, make it more interactive for our readers and overall make it pleasing for our site visitors. We also have Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as our main social media platforms. I've noticed that interacting on social media daily brings up our views on our site and brings in more viewers.
Story Page format
On our website, we can choose from five different formats for our story layouts. I believe its important to use the different formats intentionally in order to enhance the story. Depending on the story, I think using different layouts gives more diversity to the design of our site and each story.
Click here to view the full story.
For this layout, we combined four related stories that go with new procedures at the school. We linked them all in the long form template not only to have them organized, but also so our readers can find them more efficiently, and see related stories.
For this story, our Executive feature Editor at the time wrote an article on the two exchange students at the beginning of the year. Then, toward the end, I wrote an update on what the student was planning on doing next and their overall experience as an exchange student at Prosper. We combined the three stories and turned them into three chapters.
Click here to view the full story.
Breaking up text & Elements
For all of our stories, we require our staff to include different elements, whether that's poll quotes, adding a related stories bar, or infographics; using these elements helps enhance the quality of the story and make it more appealing to the readers.
Overall, I believe that incorporating these elements helps break down the stories and also adds more content for our readers. It makes the articles more pleasing to look at, but it also adds more emotion and contributes to the story behind the headline. Not only that, but as a high school student it takes away the 'essay' look, and makes it more intriguing to read.
For this feature, I used the long-form layout. I think it went well with this story because I incorporated a variety of elements like poll quotes, photos, and a bar graph. I reached out to the Ethnic Studies teacher – Shelly Patterson, to get the statistics on how many students took Ethnic Studies during each school year. I'm glad I took the extra time to do the reporting and enhance the quality of my feature. Not only was it for this article, but I also use a variety of elements for all of my articles as seen below.
Countdown & Polls
We update our countdown every time we have an upcoming break or holiday. I really like that we include a countdown at the top of our site because it adds more personalization to our newspaper, and it's fun to see how many days we have left until the next holiday or break. Another element we have on our front page is our poll at the bottom of the page. We update this poll weekly, and it gives our readers a chance to interact with us in a fun way.
Communicating through Social media
I believe that social media is the best and most efficient way to reach out to people and increase our engagement. Most students pay attention to their social media more than their email, so I use it to schedule interviews as well as get quotes and information. Not only is social media a great tool to reach out, but also putting out content like reels, posts, and Instagram stories.
Getting quotes:
Below, I reached out to a few football players to get insight on the season so far, and on head Football Coach Tyler Moore. At the time, I was working on a football analysis of how the season was going, as well as a feature on the head football coach. The players responded fairly quickly, and this was definitely an efficient way to get the job done and get quality insight.
Instagram Graphics
I created these graphics to post in a carousel on Instagram to recognize our UIL Journalism competitors and their achievements. This post brought in more viewers because it was shared 14 times on Instagram stories, and increased our following.
Instagram Reels
Reels have brought a lot of views to our social media and our newspaper. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from them, and they bring a fun aspect to our Instagram page and our newspaper.