Sunday, October 18, 2009
Short but sweet
A former student emailed me last week about this blog. I just returned her email tonight and felt inspired to update again.
We've been pretty busy over the last few weeks in Room 137. Pasteup for Issue 2 is this coming Tuesday. Homecoming was last week. We reorganized our web teams in hopes of being more efficient at updating the site.
Overall, the jury is still out on how successful we have been. I feel like I am dragging the staff through web publication. They aren't kicking and screaming (which is wonderful), but they are quite picking it up and running with it yet. I'm not sure if this is because we only have 15 people on staff, so they are spread pretty thin. Or if it is because for the life of us (and I do mean us including me) we can't get our time management skills refined.
Last week was homecoming. We had a plan for posting every day. It didn't work out exactly like that. Too often, the web editor wasn't kept in the loop of what was going on with stories. Web teams didn't finish their reports in time. I ended up editing video footage to post on Friday.
I keep asking the kids to come up with a plan, but they don't seem that invested in it. This might just be my misperception and I am open to that. As the adviser, I am struggling with how involved should I be in the web publishing since as a staff we are so new at it.
On the print side, we're a little behind there too. It seems deadlines are our nemesis right now. As of this moment, there are feature and focus stories not completed. That floors me. Those stories should have been done last week. We didn't want to have to grade deadlines, but I think that's the only way to incentivize people to get their work done on time. It's really my pet peeve: people not making the easy deadlines (I understand the hard ones).
Okay, let's end on a good note. The staff is covering some really great stories this issue. The focus section is on pregnancy (teens and teachers). I'm so proud that they are covering the topic in a new and interesting way! We are also covering swine flu. The reporter reported and wrote the story all within 24 hours! The layout of issue 2 includes a lot of pictures, which is nice since too often we are way too texty.
I guess that's all for now. Tomorrow is color pasteup and I have faith in my EICs that we are going to get it done.
We've been pretty busy over the last few weeks in Room 137. Pasteup for Issue 2 is this coming Tuesday. Homecoming was last week. We reorganized our web teams in hopes of being more efficient at updating the site.
Overall, the jury is still out on how successful we have been. I feel like I am dragging the staff through web publication. They aren't kicking and screaming (which is wonderful), but they are quite picking it up and running with it yet. I'm not sure if this is because we only have 15 people on staff, so they are spread pretty thin. Or if it is because for the life of us (and I do mean us including me) we can't get our time management skills refined.
Last week was homecoming. We had a plan for posting every day. It didn't work out exactly like that. Too often, the web editor wasn't kept in the loop of what was going on with stories. Web teams didn't finish their reports in time. I ended up editing video footage to post on Friday.
I keep asking the kids to come up with a plan, but they don't seem that invested in it. This might just be my misperception and I am open to that. As the adviser, I am struggling with how involved should I be in the web publishing since as a staff we are so new at it.
On the print side, we're a little behind there too. It seems deadlines are our nemesis right now. As of this moment, there are feature and focus stories not completed. That floors me. Those stories should have been done last week. We didn't want to have to grade deadlines, but I think that's the only way to incentivize people to get their work done on time. It's really my pet peeve: people not making the easy deadlines (I understand the hard ones).
Okay, let's end on a good note. The staff is covering some really great stories this issue. The focus section is on pregnancy (teens and teachers). I'm so proud that they are covering the topic in a new and interesting way! We are also covering swine flu. The reporter reported and wrote the story all within 24 hours! The layout of issue 2 includes a lot of pictures, which is nice since too often we are way too texty.
I guess that's all for now. Tomorrow is color pasteup and I have faith in my EICs that we are going to get it done.
