The Journalism class manages the online school newspaper, The PawPrint, but on February 28, the class created a printed version of the paper which Los Banos High has not had in over twenty years. The newspaper was delivered to campus for classrooms and staff members. The paper was also inserted into The Westside Newspaper for the community.
The process began at the beginning of the school year with school administrators, the Journalism advisor, Mrs. Kimberly McCullough, and Mr. Gene Lieb, publisher of the local newspaper, The Westside Express. They discussed what was needed to print a school newspaper and created a list of materials and resources needed to make this printing happen. Computers and software had to be ordered to support the pagination of the newspaper. This order took most of the school year, so the class had to rely on an outside paginator to layout the first edition.
With printing a newspaper comes a cost. The first step to cover the cost of printing and pagination was to sell advertisements. Journalism students reached out to local businesses to run ads in the two planned editions for this year. Businesses were very supportive which allowed the class to have enough money to cover the cost of the two planned editions.
McCullough and Nevaeh Prado, editor selected articles from the year that would showcase our campus and our students achievements. Once the articles were chosen, they were sent to the paginator who laid out the paper.
McCullough said, “I am thrilled to have this opportunity for my students to understand the entire process of writing articles, pagination, prepress skills, and the final product. When students see their names attached to their articles, it is worth all the time and effort they put into this class.”
She did add that the class has a lot of work to do. “For this last newspaper edition, we will have to figure out the pagination program on our own using the new computers and software.” McCullough said that she and Prado will learn the program together and eventually, teach the second year students how to paginate in the future.
The Journalism staff members loved having the printed newspaper and seeing their name and staff picture in the paper. Kali Goodger (12) whose article appeared in the newspaper stated, “Rather than only being excited for my published article, I was excited that journalism’s hard work and dedication to writing was being recognized by public newspapers.”
Nevaeh Prado (12) also had an article printed. She stated, “I am very happy and excited for everyone in town to read my article and my staff members articles.”
The PawPrint will continue to publish every two weeks online throughout the school year. She said, “We really have to thank Mr. Lieb for assisting our program. He pointed us in the right direction and gave the class a chance to print. He did a lot of the heavy lifting for us, and opened up this path for us to go down. Keeping this career field of Journalism available to students is so important to our world. We both want this to be a successful partnership, and we want to keep highlighting our students, our high school, and our achievements for our community through our newspapers.”
McCullough hopes to publish the printed version four times during a school year.
