Entrepreneurship
Dealing with our debt
On the left, an example of the invoices that we have created to send to businesses when processing their payment. On right, the first draft of our T-shirt design. I am hoping to roll out our merch line before Spring Break
The debt was the primary issue that our editorial team dealt with this year. Due to miscommunication several years ago (when our advisor was on maternity leave), we have acquired a significant amount of unresolved debt that we owe to our school. Below, I have outlined some of the solutions we have come up with.
Working closer with administration:
Last year, the administration told us we cannot print. However, after sitting down in a meeting with them, we came to a compromise: we could print 3 out of 6 issues if we fully funded them ourselves. As an EIC this year, I have made an effort to build a closer relationship with our principal. I communicate with her each news cycle and inform her of any significant changes in our funding. By opening up communication, we were able to build back some lost trust.
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Going to PTSO
When our admin couldn’t fund us, our advisor suggested that we go to PTSO. So far, The Emery has gone to every PTSO meeting in the 2020-2021 school year. And, the PTSO has fully funded 2 of our issues. When pitching to the PTSO, I created a lengthy slideshow to address why we need the money and The Emery’s overall importance in our community. The president of the PTSO called my slide show “professional and incredibly mature”.
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Ads + Fundraising
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Although we are currently funded by our PTSO, we still try to sell ads to cover awards and other external costs. In the last issue, we sold a record-breaking number of 6 ads. To increase ad sales, we have dedicated several days to in-class to teach marketing. Once a student sells an ad, as EIC, I worked with the businesses to process the payment and close out the sale. For fundraising, we are currently working on developing Huron Emery Merch and working with local restaurants to do food fundraisers.
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Funding Presentation, presented at Oct. PTSO meeting
Connecting back to our readers
After talking with my peers, I realized that we needed to refocus some of our content back on our school. While we were doing groundbreaking work on national issues such as climate change and politics, we needed to refocus some of our content back on Huron. This year, we placed further emphasis on Huron sports, even adding a sports recap column to summarize each sports season. Our sports section has evolved from mainly covering professional athletes to now highlighting athletes at our school. Additionally, we added a calendar to remind readers of important dates coming up. Overall, we are striving to make our content more usable to the average reader.
Huron News is a graphic that I created to recap our school's virtual bulletin board on Powerschool
Club recruitment
Our program is small, and the majority of the staff are upperclassmen. We knew, to grow, we need to recruit more people to our class. The newspaper at our school needs to become an established extracurricular like band or engineering. We have expanded our recruitment by continuing the newspaper program at Clague, a feeder middle school, and talking to 8th grade English classes. Additionally, we had a recruitment meeting for underclassmen at our school. Even though it was our first meeting, we had over 10 students show up. We plan to have another recruitment meeting in the Spring.
Above, our very first recruitment meeting. Below, an Instagram post I made as apart of our recruitment campaign.