Marketing and Audience Engagement
Marketing is important for every publication, as it costs money to produce each issue. Additionally, without an active readership, there is little use for publication. Student newspapers need to work extra hard to implement strategies to gain readership and a strong monetary base.
Audience Engagement
Without readership, a paper has no purpose. On The Southerner, we ensure the paper is widely accessible to all Midtown students and faculty. Additionally, we integrate students into the paper to make it as engaging as possible. We also focus on recruiting future staff members.
Above is our site traffic for the first semester of the 2024-25 school year. (Aug. 1-Dec. 20) We strive to maintain this strong readership by producing well-written stories across all sections - news, comment, sports, lifestyle and multimedia. Below is our most viewed stories in the past year.
My stories! I create readership through my reporting. I write high-quality, important stories that attract a large audience.
We post stories weekly across all sections; this makes sure our audience has new media each time they visit our site. This attracts them to revisit our site!
We display our slogan at the top of our website. We also maintain an attractive logo and design!
A few examples of how we keep our website engaging!
We post news, sports and student life briefs three times weekly for audience engagement!
We also post "Humans of Midtown" - mini profiles on students around the school - daily. Highlighting Midtown students, faculty and friends increases readership and engagement!
We also have audience engagement in the print paper.
Page 5 always features a question of the month with student and faculty responses, and a student, faculty or community-member written letter to the editor.
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Page 10 includes three Humans of Midtown from our website.
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These elements come directly from our school and community; they are a way to include our audience. Incorporating these elements drastically increases readership amongst Midtown students and faculty.
We distribute the paper across Midtown to make it as accessible to students and faculty as possible. When the paper arrives, each staff member chooses a hallway and distributes 5-10 papers to each classroom. Every time we walk into a class, students are excited to read the newest issue of The Southerner!
We also focus on recruiting new staff members. It is important to maintain a large staff so we can spread responsibilities. Additionally, it is the best way to have a large pool of well-reported stories to choose from.
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Every year, The Southerner runs a booth at freshman orientation where we encourage rising freshman to join our award-winning program.
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Additionally, as a member of BETA club, I have the unique opportunity to lead tours for eighth graders. I always lead my groups to the journalism classroom and explain why they should sign up for the journalism pathway next year.
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This shows our staff growth in just one year! Additionally, this year we have more journalism 1 classes than usual, meaning that our staff will be even bigger next year.
2024-25 Staff
2023-24 Staff
Marketing
Each 16-page issue costs $800 to print. The Southerner prints eight issues a year. We have additional costs including Sno Flow features, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and ownership of our website. Since we are not school-funded, the journalism program is responsible for paying all of these costs. To ensure we are able to do this, every staff member is tasked with getting 10 $40 subscriptions each. Subscribers receive eight papers a year. We have several Google Forms and Sheets to keep track of each staff member's subscriptions. Additionally, my fellow staff members are creating a booster club focused on journalism to raise money for the staff. They have created merchandise and plan to launch it in 2025.
We use this sheet to create stickers for mailing papers to our subscribers. Then, we organize stacks by where each paper is going and send them out.