Internet Research for Techquest Project

For my Techquest, I plan to implement an online newspaper into my classroom. I am preparing to incorporate some of it this year, but will really implement the majority of it next year when a group of both advanced and beginning students enter the class.

The Process of Researching

Researching for articles to support my decision to move the newspaper online was surprisingly difficult for me. I started by searching for “online newspapers”+”high school” and conducting other similar Boolean searches on Google. Needless to say, I did not get the results I was looking for, so I tried Google Scholar and the databases we have access to at the school. Again, the results I got were not those I was hoping for. The only valuable resources I found were newspapers that had already gone online. While these will be very beneficial in the construction of the site, I still wanted some research to support my decision to move online. The articles I did find on the databases and on Google Scholar were published in the 90s and were very outdated. Thankfully, Sue emailed me some links she found using the Internet Public Library. These links proved to be very beneficial.

Best Results of Research

I split my research goals in two:

1. Research to support that other high school newspapers are going online and it is beneficial to start the transition soon

2. Examples of high school newspapers that have already gone online to aid my students and I in designing the website

Research to support moving online

The first article I found to be amusing was actually found as a link to a lesson plan on highschooljournalism.org. This link brought me to the article “Key News Audiences Now Blend Online and Traditional Sources: Audience Segments in a Changing News Environment.” (http://people-press.org/report/444/news-media). This article revealed the results of a 2008 Pew study. Possibly the most interesting result in this article was that “Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially more people regularly get news online than regularly watch one of the nightly network news broadcasts (37% vs. 29%).” In this article, there is also a graph that readership of newspaper, radio, and tv news has steadily decreased while the readership of online news has steadily increased. In 2008, a larger percentage of people got their news online for three or more days a week than read a newspaper. I can imagine the number of people who read their news online will continue to increase as the technologically savvy youth of today get older.

Because of the increase in online readership, it is important that the high school newspapers go online. This will not only help to retain readership, but will also prepare for the future of online publications.

In addition, there were several articles that had information about the flood of high school newspapers that were going online, including “High School Journalism Going Online.” This article, published in 2009, stated that “In the past 12 to 18 months, the number of schools using ASNE's content-management system doubled to 3,000.” The biggest factors attributed to causing the change to publishing online were budget and the change in the industry as a whole. As stated earlier, this was a comment commonly found in several articles I encountered.

After having read these two articles and several others, I feel fully confident that the conversion is the appropriate thing to do as of now.

Research of examples of high school newspapers online already

While struggling in my research for quality articles, Sue pointed me in the direction of highschooljournalism.org. Once arriving at the page, I searched “online newspaper” on the site and instantly found article after article about other high schools converting to online newspapers for budget reasons as well as readership issues. Instead of listing numerous articles about individual newspapers going online, I will instead just include this link that you can click which lists all of the articles about high school newspapers going online.

I found a few examples of high school newspapers that have already gone online. Some of them were some I would like to model the Drifter after, while some were not well designed. Instead of pointing out those that I would consider examples of what not to do, I will highlight a couple that I really liked, which include Newton West High School’s Lion’s Roar , Grand Junction’s “Orange and Black,” and Carmel High School’s HiLite Online.

Some of the elements all of these papers had in common, which I would like to implement on the Drifter site, include:

Podcasts

Vodcasts

Blogs

Polls

Multiple pages that are easy to navigate

Access to Back Issues

The ability to create dominance in story postings

Easy to read/good graphic design

Calendar

In this research, I also found there were several services I could use to construct this website, with the best being School Newspapers Online. This site was too expensive though, so I am going to start out with the free/cheap Weebly and then hopefully progress from there.

As a side note, I also found some lesson plans for getting my students excited for publishing online, since some have reservations. I also found that many newspapers are producing both an online and print publication. Most only print a couple issues a year and are special newspapers for events such as spring break, prom, the senior issue, etc. This might be an effective way for me to transition next year into publishing online, since students will get experience publishing online but will still be able to have some of their work published in print.