High school media programs need to keep their focus on their campuses

Here's an eye-catching paragraph from today's Poynter Institute post by Taylor Blatchford, former Colorado Student Journalist of the Year, currently a staff reporter for the Seattle Times:

A 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center showed that only 3% of U.S. adults ages 18-29 prefer to get their news from print publications. (77% of this age group said they preferred to get news digitally; 11% prefer TV and 5% prefer radio.)

Note that Pew didn't survey high school students, but it would not be surprising to find the figures not being much different for those under 18. However, I suspect that very different circumstances and communities make the high school campus quite a bit more receptive to print publications.

The heart of any school print program must be the yearbook, of course. College yearbooks are mostly a faint memory but high school yearbooks continue to thrive, even during the pandemic. High school is the last quintessential American experience and a large number of students and parents value a permanent history of those years.

There is still immense excitement when yearbooks are distributed, along with frenzied signings of books and hours of browsing and reliving great (and not so great) memories. Part of this is the much tighter high school community, usually confined to one building and (in theory) rooting for one another, their teams and their clubs and their performing groups. Consumers might even know who is creating the book, unlike college campus news programs, which are diffuse and often lost in the thousands focused on college academics.

Taylor is a smart woman and she provides this advice: 

Think about that number again — 3%. This means that if you’re focusing most of your time and energy on your print publication, you’re ignoring the preferences of nearly all of your student audience. No matter how often you publish in print, your student publication needs to have a workable website and a presence on the major social media platforms.

I agree with the need for a coordinated online presence, with multimedia reporting featured. And her advice is directed to college media.

I simply add that when we consider the confined community of potential readers a high school presents, simply dropping print papers or magazines may be an over-reaction, or perhaps even a surrender.

The annual distribution of the school yearbook need not be the only exciting moment for print in our schools. A substantial, well-reported and well-designed magazine, even if published only once per quarter (which seems to be the newest trend), can generate similar excitement.

The pandemic has not been kind to schools, with fewer and fewer chances to be "in community," from pep assemblies to drama productions to sporting events. 

It's great to build up a large number of hits and clicks, and to boast of thousands of followers, but I suspect that many of those visitors to our sites are not engaging very deeply with the news. This is based on my own usage of social media and websites. Print invites deeper interactions.

There is something amazing about an entire community of students holding the very same document in their hands, even if that attention wanes after a morning.

I have vivid memories at two different schools of paper distribution day and wandering the halls before school (and after papers were available) seeing so many students sitting in front of their lockers and devouring the latest issue. 

From my perspective, students are hungry to read, hungry to be entertained and taken out of themselves. The sheer novelty of a printed school magazine may bring some of the same feeling we get when we receive an actual letter in the mail.

And we can keep the printed material as part of our personal histories.