By: Haili Luevano
Writing for a high school newspaper is an arduous yet rewarding task that can rival any other extracurricular activity. However, the actual process of writing these articles goes widely unnoticed.
For the students behind the Northwest Viking Saga, the first step in publication is a content meeting. This is held at the beginning of every issue, allowing members to decide what stories are to be written and by whom. Each issue allows 17 to 18 stories, without taking into account any room that needs to be spared for ads.
“A lot of people, I feel like, think that [stories are] pre-chosen,” said Emily Krupicka, a sophomore. “Because I know I’ve had people come to me and say ‘Do you get to choose?’ It’s…free-range of what you want to do.”
The enjoyment that comes from writing, editing and publishing your own work is indeed rewarding, but it isn’t an easy task. Interview questions are expected to be written up and sources contacted within a day or two of the content meeting’s conclusion, followed by setting up interview dates. Photos need to be obtained in a timely manner and edited in Photoshop, which entails adding a black and white filter and lightening the image since the newspaper prints much darker than what it looks like on screen.
First-round edits are held roughly eight days after the start of the issue. During this time, students’ work is printed off and passed around to be peer reviewed. After three people have looked over and signed off on the article, Kirsten Gilliland, the newspaper teacher, adds her own edits before handing the papers back to their owners. Once the edits are applied by the writer, the process is then repeated at least two more times.
Close to the time of first-round edits, students begin transferring their articles onto Adobe InDesign. The program allows students to preview their work on the actual newspaper before printing.
“Sometimes I have to shorten my story even though I may not want to,” said Trinity Sossong, a sophomore. “To make it fit on the page.”
Spacing, alignment and font are also things that are looked at very closely at this stage in production. Compromises have to be made when more than one person needs to work on a single page, sometimes resulting in a conflict when two different versions of the same page are saved onto the server. This is why each version is titled alphabetically, with the furthest version reaching so far as M, and then saved as an entirely new document.
Once final edits have been made and the InDesign pages are deemed complete, the pages are sent off to be printed.
“We print through the Grand Island Independent,” Gilliland said. “Each month we create an issue, they print 800 copies.”
After the copies are brought back to Northwest, they’re distributed during advisement. Each student is given a stack of papers and a list of teachers to hand them out to. Newspapers are to be handed to each individual student rather than just left on the teacher’s desk, to ensure the most publicity. Despite this, there are always extras.
“After our first round of distribution, I would say that there’s half left, or a third left,” Gilliland said. “Even that stack goes down because I take tickets and run clock quite a bit, so I make sure that copies always go to ticket-taking tables and then parents and family members and adults in the community can pick them up too. That gets rid of a couple hundred more.” In addition, copies are handed out to board members during their meetings.
Of course, with the recent outbreak of COVID-19 and the shutdown of Northwest, all previous methods of publication were forced aside in order to produce quality content despite the setback. Adjusting to change and working around an altered time frame is something that the Viking Saga crew is currently handling with the help of multiple communal platforms.
A content meeting was held on Monday, April 6 at 1:30 p.m. via Zoom, a platform for video and audio conferencing. Gilliland led the discussion over the newspaper’s March edition. All articles pertaining to the issue had been put on hold due to the school’s closure, but were urged to be completed so that they could be posted on WordPress and shared with the community as normal.
The April edition was also discussed, leading to the conclusion that each member would write at least a single article for the issue. Interviews are expected to be conducted and transcribed as normal. With the constrictions of InDesign no longer applicable, students don’t have to worry about their articles surpassing a word limit.
All of this will be conducted while adhering to the safety regulations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the threat of COVID-19 presents many problems to the community as a whole, the Viking Saga crew will continue to provide the students, staff and the families of Northwest the best quality news in the most timely manner.
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