Web and Social Media
Let's face it, social media is slowly but surely taking over our teenagers' lives, whether we like it our not. Having an active social media presence is something that has been extremely important to me, to both promote our stories and inform our students about the daily stories we put out. Scroll to see the ways that I do that!
Instagram Posts
Our staff began creating Instagram posts this year to boost engagement for some of our spotlighted stories. When I made this post, I used Canva to place text on the dominant image from the story on our website and included the date, title, subheadline, and artist of the image. I also included a brief snippet of the story, and ultimately, these posts have increased the amount of users going to our website.
​I set our Instagram posts to also post on Facebook, so we can have continuity with our posts across the platforms. My favorite types of posts to make are after dances like homecoming and prom, as these typically get the most interactions and are the best ways to plug our website.
Instagram Stories
Our staff uses our Instagram stories to post polls to gain information for our stories. We have also found this to be an effective way to find additional people to interview for our stories. For my story about the digital SAT, I posted a poll to students, gathering their opinions on if they were on board with the change. I also posted an Instagram story for my opinion piece about PragerU, with the dominant image and link so readers could be directed to our website. We also use our Instagram stories to post staff accomplishments (ex. Best of SNOs).
The use of Facebook has been an absolute game changer for our staff. ​This school year, we switched from using X to Facebook to get more eyes on our stories. I make every Facebook post in both the Hagerty Journalism page and in parent groups as well. I specifically curate these to include several photos from major events, so parents get a feel of what was happening there, and look for their child in the images, as well as an intro paragraph and link to our extended story about whatever event or topic the post is on. I've really enjoyed being able to implement the use of Facebook as our social media, and have a direct way to communicate with parents about any questions they may have about when our next issue is coming out, when an event is and more.
YouTube
I'm responsible for posting and editing every video that our staff creates onto Youtube. I made the switch to post our podcasts onto Youtube and embedding on our website rather than using Soundcloud, so we can streamline where our viewers and listeners can find our multimedia content. This makes it super easy for me to repost the links to the videos onto our Instagram, and shows the video to the subscribers of the Hagertyjourn channel.
Short-form Content
This year, our staffers have really wanted to create more short form and interactive content to post on our social medias. I post every short form video onto our Youtube channel as Youtube Shorts and also on Instagram and Facebook as reels.
Some of my favorite of these have been On Trend by Faith Walsh, where she interviews students about their thoughts on trendy topics and does silly editing and DJ Mukbang by Delaney Roberts and Jessica Johnson, who fully commit to buying $30 worth of food to try for every episode. My staffers love creating this content, and as a bonus, our followers and readers love interacting with it!
Web Redesign
Before
This year, we redesigned our home page after receiving helpful feedback from FSPA (click images to enlarge). I was a big fan of our previous home screen; however, since all of the story categories were collaged near one another, it did make it confusing to clearly see what story was under that specific category (news, opinions, feature, sports). This year, we implemented trending stories and multimedia widgets on the home screen, to allow readers an easy way to find new content. We also added a BluePrint Poll to our website that we change biweekly to replace our old "Pop Question" poll that was changed much less frequently.
After
Daily Posts
Both branches of our publication, print and online, are big responsibilities. Last year, we were named an All-Florida online publication and a Sunshine Standout and received our first Online Pacemaker in program history. recognized by SNO and NSPA as an Online Pacemaker Finalist. Our organized posting calendar is the main reason for this, as it ensures that we have at least one story posting on our website every weekday.
Mixed Media
I love to have interactive mixed media elements on our website and making out stories appear appealing, and my experience doing this has expanded my journalistic knowledge and understanding. See some examples below!
Homecoming celebrates 20 years of Hagerty
For this story, we wanted to make one monster homecoming story using the longform template on SNO to incorporate all aspects. This story featured five separate stories about the homecoming week festivities, as well as photo galleries and a video, which I designed on the website. This remains one of our most-viewed stories this year.
Little bit of chaos
For this story, I decided to cover the early childhood education program at Hagerty. As anyone could imagine, high school students running a preschool is a little bit chaotic. To go along with my story, I wrote a mini-feature on the ECE teacher, Mrs. Burrell, that was retiring, and I decided to include a photo gallery of children at the preschool, as well as students during ECE I class to capture all sides of the program, and of course, the chaos.
Sleep tight
My online editor Greta and I co-wrote this story to tackle the topic of sleep deprivation within teenagers. I used the longform template and created chapters for each portion of the story. I also set up an "infobox," a SNO story element in which you can put a photo with corresponding information, for each method that students use to help them fall asleep.