Before the school year came to a close, the club had a meeting (not well-attended) and decided that going online is the right route to pulling ourselves out of our financial problems as well as re-energizing our membership. The first result comes from the fact that we can do the website for something like $100 per year, compared to printing costs of $325 per issue. The second hope is that our members will be more excited because their stories will be published regularly, and we can report actual news!
This also adjusts the focus of our summer meeting: we'll be getting clear on the relationship between the newspaper (WolfPrints), the web site (achswolfprints.com), the school web site, the Wolf Prints Facebook page, Twitter, and Echo (our school learning platform). Then we'll have to quickly make some design decisions, do some fun journalism training aimed at newer members, and get down to the technical aspects of using our technology. That's a lot to accomplish in three days!
The JEA Outreach Academy I attended at SF State was a great help. I met another great group of Journalism teachers from the SF Bay Area, spent 3 days talking about issues of journalism education, bought a few really great new books on journalism, and picked up a slew of resources on all kinds of topics. My "bookmarks" listing is now overflowing.
Yesterday I met with the journalism teacher from Hercules High School, Natalie Wojinski. Two hours of sharing experiences and ideas left both of us with a lot more clarity and new ideas to try out. I know I'll be using Natalie's wisdom going forward, and I hope my experiences will give Natalie some additional inspiration.
Now, to the dashboard. I do need to make some background decisions for the online presence so we can hit cyberspace running in August. I'll have more to report in a few days after lunch with our Coach, Jay Gamel, and the co-publisher of Kenwood Press, Ann Quenan Peters on Friday.
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