Read McEachern High's Tribal Times online at www.mceachernhigh.org/page/tribal-times.
Fifteen years ago, McEachern High teacher Lynlee Doar made a case for having a journalism class that would produce the Powder Spring school’s newspaper, Tribal Times.
“When I came here, I kept asking why we didn’t have a paper,” she said. “The kids wanted it, and we had tried doing it as an after-school thing, but it didn’t work out.”
What Doar proposed instead was a class dedicated to teaching journalism principles and publishing a newspaper. With a budget of $10,000, the school acquired computers and cameras and a production budget. In 2003, the class enrolled 30 students who learned the basics of photography, caption writing, reporting and page design. About four years ago, Doar, who has a journalism degree, combined different levels of the class into one in order to keep it going.
“When Hill Grove High opened (nearby), I lost a lot of kids, and sometimes I didn’t have enough kids for each section, so we blended the class. But we usually ended up putting out a few issues a year, even though our budget went down to $4,000.”
A few weeks ago, the paper’s staff took a giant leap into the contemporary world of newspaper publishing when Tribal Times went online. The response was immediate and positive, said Doar.
“It’s already made a difference,” she said. “We’re getting feedback that people are reading it and reposting it; one of our booster clubs used our photos in their program. And by going digital, we can update it all the time so it’s current.”
Senior Cheyenne Brown, the Tribal Times’s editor who is in her third year of journalism courses, said the entire class was behind the move to a digital paper.
“We reinvented it,” she said. “Most publications these days are going online, so we picked up on that trend. We also knew that when we printed it out, a lot of paper was wasted, so we’re saving trees doing it this way.”
The online edition will also help spread the news of the 2,100-student school into the surrounding community, said Doar.
“We used to try to get the word out to the community through selling advertisements and patrons to local businesses and asking them to offer the paper at their places of business,” she said. “Now they can see it online and let the community know that we are more than the negative reports or athletics they see on the news.”
Coming up with content is a challenge, but that might change as more readers respond and interact with the online edition, said Brown.
“It can be hard to think of new ideas, and we always have to write student-based articles on topics about things they’re dealing with at school,” she said. “But last year, we also did articles on all sorts of topics, from profiling to recycling - things students are dealing with outside school as well.”
Finding story ideas, writing them and producing an online paper are completely in the hands of the students, said Doar. “Our principal supports this as a student paper, and the students are the ones responsible for it,” she said. “There’s no prior review. As long as it’s journalistically sound, I let them print what they want. And I’ve never had a problem with that.”
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