In addition to my duties teaching English, I am also the Newspaper and Yearbook adviser. It is my job to make sure that the budding journalists of Alhambra work hard and get the news out. We have just finished with our second edition (No. 2) of the school newspaper, the Scimitar.
Getting a school newspaper out is not easy. Keeping teens focused on what is newsworthy and what is just junk takes some deftness. Also, our news cycle is a month long. That makes some of our stories a little old by press time, but the experience of working on a paper newspaper is one that they won't have anywhere else. Last year's editor is now at the Cronkite School at Arizona State University working on her journalism degree.
As proud as I am of my students for putting together such a great edition, I am also proud to say that over 1/2 of the stories in this newspaper began as drafts written on a typewriter. They have been edited and edited again digitally, but they began as typewritten stories. Anyway, if you are interested in a copy, send your address to adney@phoenixunion.org and I'll pop a free copy in the mail.
I know that no one in the Typosphere is opposed to a paper newspaper, but every once and a while a colleague says, "You should just put that on-line. It's so much easier." That makes me cringe. If it was so easy to do the New York Times would have just gone all digital. For some markets all-digital makes sense, but for my market it does not. We are a small monthly with a circulation of 1000. The adviser before me tried to do an on-line only newspaper and that went over like a lead balloon. No one read the on-line newspaper because it was on-line. So, as long as I am the adviser, we will have a paper newspaper.
