Suggestions for our paper
By Ryan Hennigan
During the seminars at Columbia University I heard a lot of interesting suggestions that I feel we should incorporate into the Pembroke Sentinel. Personally, I tended to attend seminars that were centered on sports, advertisements, and newspaper layouts. I also gained a great deal of information from the opinions of other members of our staff and from reviewing other schools’ newspapers at Columbia.
I will start first with the smaller tweaks and progress towards the larger suggestions. In the sports seminars, I can not even tell you how many times I heard the words “don’t cheerlead” and “do not cover national sports.” This caught Nick and I by surprise as this is what we sometimes tend to do. I realized that I myself tend to use the word ‘fortunately’ or ‘great season’ to an extent and I also have done stories on the Red sox and Nick has done one on the Patriots. What we have is a high school paper and we want to write about our athletes rather than stories covered by professional newspapers. This leads me to another topic; we do cover every sport with our sport shorts, but there at least needs to be a paragraph about each jv and freshman team in there as there is interest in them. Every team for every sport needs to be covered. Another suggestion concerns our athlete of the month story which we are just starting this issue. In this story, it may be a good idea to write a short bit about the athlete’s performance and then a large deal about his life or an unusual event that took place. We should try to find an athlete whose had a mishap (cough Champa) or has persevered through something; just as in our Teacher Feature (sorry about Shultz, she was boring).
I have one main suggestion about our ads and that is that we invoke a one column wide, two inches down ad to attract possibly parents who feel they will not make business from the ad but would like to make a small contribution (ad would cost $10-20). I feel that we should also raise each ad price by perhaps $20 or more. This would bring in more income and hopefully then we could at least put our front page in color which I feel is necessary to attract a larger amount of readers.
I have a few suggestions concerning our page layouts. I saw a lot of papers at the convention and I think that the knicks should run vertically the length of the front page, as it looks more attractive. Also, from other papers, instead of placing pictures at the corners of stories as we have been prone to do; we should place them in the middle of stories and text wrap (I will show examples). Furthermore, there needs to be an arts and entertainment section applied. We do make stories such as artist of the month and play reviews, but they need to be grouped together in one section and we can create more story ideas to fill this section in.
Overall, I feel that these suggestions will increase our income and reader base by a significant amount. And addressing our long battle over featurey or inverted pyramid style leads; I feel featurey is always the way to go. We have a reader base of teenagers with short attention spans and creative imaginations that would enjoy the colorful, attention-grabbing openers.
By Ryan Hennigan
During the seminars at Columbia University I heard a lot of interesting suggestions that I feel we should incorporate into the Pembroke Sentinel. Personally, I tended to attend seminars that were centered on sports, advertisements, and newspaper layouts. I also gained a great deal of information from the opinions of other members of our staff and from reviewing other schools’ newspapers at Columbia.
I will start first with the smaller tweaks and progress towards the larger suggestions. In the sports seminars, I can not even tell you how many times I heard the words “don’t cheerlead” and “do not cover national sports.” This caught Nick and I by surprise as this is what we sometimes tend to do. I realized that I myself tend to use the word ‘fortunately’ or ‘great season’ to an extent and I also have done stories on the Red sox and Nick has done one on the Patriots. What we have is a high school paper and we want to write about our athletes rather than stories covered by professional newspapers. This leads me to another topic; we do cover every sport with our sport shorts, but there at least needs to be a paragraph about each jv and freshman team in there as there is interest in them. Every team for every sport needs to be covered. Another suggestion concerns our athlete of the month story which we are just starting this issue. In this story, it may be a good idea to write a short bit about the athlete’s performance and then a large deal about his life or an unusual event that took place. We should try to find an athlete whose had a mishap (cough Champa) or has persevered through something; just as in our Teacher Feature (sorry about Shultz, she was boring).
I have one main suggestion about our ads and that is that we invoke a one column wide, two inches down ad to attract possibly parents who feel they will not make business from the ad but would like to make a small contribution (ad would cost $10-20). I feel that we should also raise each ad price by perhaps $20 or more. This would bring in more income and hopefully then we could at least put our front page in color which I feel is necessary to attract a larger amount of readers.
I have a few suggestions concerning our page layouts. I saw a lot of papers at the convention and I think that the knicks should run vertically the length of the front page, as it looks more attractive. Also, from other papers, instead of placing pictures at the corners of stories as we have been prone to do; we should place them in the middle of stories and text wrap (I will show examples). Furthermore, there needs to be an arts and entertainment section applied. We do make stories such as artist of the month and play reviews, but they need to be grouped together in one section and we can create more story ideas to fill this section in.
Overall, I feel that these suggestions will increase our income and reader base by a significant amount. And addressing our long battle over featurey or inverted pyramid style leads; I feel featurey is always the way to go. We have a reader base of teenagers with short attention spans and creative imaginations that would enjoy the colorful, attention-grabbing openers.
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