Web

Breaking News

Two years ago, I used a little-known module called “Breaking News” on the website to announce the number of Siemens Competition semifinalists and regional finalists: 5 regional finalists and 32 regional semifinalists from Jefferson, with only 1 finalist and 3 semifinalists from FCPS who were not from TJ (picture unavailable as posts were deleted from website after a few weeks). I also posted the announcement on Twitter.

One day later:

Leading up to the reveal of our new principal, my advisor kept me informed on the time/location of reveal & which sources would be good to interview right after the reveal. I interviewed Ms. Suzette Henry, teacher stakeholder representative and English teacher, ahead of the reveal and led the breaking news coverage, bringing on two others, Avni and MiJin, to help post the news article about our new principal by the end of the day.

breking news

Ms. Harris notified me at around 9 a.m. of the name of our new principal. In a pause in the middle of history class, I kept communicating back and forth with her to piece together what we would need. She had yearbook staff take a picture of Dr. Ann Bonitatibus and get a sound clip from her answering some questions about the main topics she would be working to address.

By 7th period, we found out that Dr. Bonitatibus had held a meeting with members of the Student Government Association; we interviewed Sabria Kazmi, SGA member, and astronomy and astrophysics elective teacher LeeAnn Hennig after spending class time researching the principal’s background. We did this to get the teacher perspective of how the new principal would fit in at this school, providing balanced coverage along with the student perspectives.

We transcribed all the interviews and wrote the article before the end of the school day. Ms. Harris reviewed the article and we posted it to tjTODAY Online less than 12 hours after we discovered the new principal’s identity.

“Bonitatibus announced as new principal beginning 2017-2018 school year”

by Christine Zhao, Avni Singh, and MiJin Cho

After seven months of searching, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) announced Dr. Ann Bonitatibus as Jefferson’s new principal on May 26. Prior to coming to Jefferson, Bonitatibus served as superintendent of Conejo Valley Unified School District as well as chief operating officer for Frederick County Public Schools and vice principal of two schools in the district. She was also the principal at New Market Middle School and Catoctin High School, and taught English and math for eight years.

“She has a broad background in english and math, so she fits in well with both categories here,” Astronomy and Astrophysics elective teacher, research lab director and lab coordinator LeeAnn Hennig said. “She seems athletic, adventurous, enthusiastic and capable.”

Bonitatibus, with a long-serving background in education, was chosen by FCPS with the assistance of the consulting firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates. The principal selection committee went through several rounds of training, interviews, and stakeholder meetings to narrow down their selections.

“The firm that conducted the search and looked for candidates and worked with the Region 2 leadership to put in front of the panel,” teacher stakeholder representative and English teacher Suzette Henry said. “[The firm] put together the questions, and all the questions they put together came from feedback from all of the stakeholder groups. They asked the same questions; there was consistency. I felt as one of the stakeholder representatives that we were heard.”

For more, visit tjTODAY.org/21198

This article went on to garner 1500+ page views.

Timeliness

See: Establishing Relationships within the Editorial Staff for timeliness in covering the story about UMichigan deferrals

Social Media Coverage

I love tjTODAY Online because it is so easy to showcase the amazing things that students are doing. Linda Diaz, a senior, founded HappyNotes for her Girl Scout Gold Award project. When I joined their Facebook group, I was just astounded at the regularity of their performances and how much traction she’d gotten just by recruiting from the band. Having an online link to the article allowed her to share it easily on her personal site and Facebook page which she chose to do after I sent her the link when the article was completed. The article gave her a platform to share her organization with more than the people that already knew about HappyNotes.

linda and article

“Happy for HappyNotes: Girl Scout Gold Award Project spreads music to retirement homes across the region”

by Christine Zhao

The Girl Scout Gold Award, the highest achievement in the Girl Scouts Program, seeks to encourage leadership and achievement through Take Action projects in the community. While Girl Scout websites often suggest projects ranging from sports clinics to recycling campaigns, junior Linda Diaz had a different project in mind when proposing her Gold Award idea: combine her passion for music with the music program at her school to establish something positive and sustainable in the local community.

“I knew I wanted somehow bring more music to the community,” Diaz said. “In the past, I had gone caroling and played flute for retirement homes during the winter holiday season, but I realized that seldom do people perform outside of that season.”

Inspired by this deficiency, Diaz came up with the idea of HappyNotes, an organization that would perform year-round in retirement homes across the Northern Virginia region.

“Considering that TJ has a large supply of wonderful musicians, I figured that instead of just practicing to perform for our families, we could perform directly to the community that can’t normally get access to live music,” Diaz said.

For more, visit tjTODAY.org/20932

Multimedia Convergence

To publicize our online series, “Being 1.5 in 100,” I posted teaser pictures and quotes on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. From experience, I know that reposting the same image loses a lot of the audience’s interest: so, I chose unique quotes from two of our sources and shared them with our followers. Empirically, since I posted it on Instagram, I saw us gain 4 followers.

View this post on Instagram

"Here I am a grandfather; my middle daughter, I told her, 'You had sex, you had a baby. That’s a decision you made.' Will it stop her from getting her degree? No. She’s a senior in college now. It ain’t stop her from getting a degree. Luckily she has parents that we got enough that we can help take care of her and my grandbaby. We’re comfortable and I’m a lot better off than my grandparents were, than my mom was, and they’re going to be better off than I was. That’s what your parents do for you: they just want you to better than they were.” Pictured: Security employee and wrestling coach Charles Phillips holds his granddaughter in his arms. Phillips grew up in a single-parent household, guided by the mentorship of family and influential coaches and adults. To read his full story when it comes out, subscribe to our online series! Link: https://tinyurl.com/tjtoday-series1-updates

A post shared by tjMEDIA (@tjhsst_media) on

I worked with Ashley Huang from tjTODAY to film, edit, interview for, and create a video profile of Mr. Phillips, a security worker at our school. We released this to our tjTODAY Youtube page as a public video so we could appeal to our audience of regular subscribers as well.

For Your Information

This February, we started posting some of the post resource-heavy articles onto tjTODAY Online, including our print cover story about inequality in TJ Admissions. Our adviser felt that these articles held the most potential to reference online links and reach a broader audience. I included the dozens of links used to back up my article so readers could refer directly to the source.

Because of this, not only did the superintendent Scott Braband read the cover story I co-wrote with Katherine when he came to our school, the opinion article I posted online reached all the way to Kate Dalby, the president of InspiringTestPreparationInc. I also had people coming up to me in the following days telling me how they were grateful that this important issue had been covered in tjTODAY.

email

Correction…

After a misprint in the October issue, I didn’t want to wait until the next month for an error to be corrected. Since it wasn’t an informational misprint but rather a stylistic one, I decided to forgo that route and post directly to Facebook where I could reach readers faster when this article was still topical. Posting it on my personal Facebook page also allowed a wider audience of people to read the article, even if they did not have access to the print version.