Why is the website and breaking news important to our staff?Our website allows us the opportunity to write and publish stories within a few hours of an event happening. While our staff is still working on the skills needed to be able to write a breaking news story with the necessary elements, I have been able to write a few, along with a few more experienced staffers. Breaking news has been my focus for the staff since last year, when the role of the website was still in question. At the time, we had relegated it to simply the place where print articles went after they were published. I hoped to give it a unique role-- one that would give people a reason to check it. Breaking news is important to our student body. Whenever we publish a breaking news story, it receives more engagement than most other stories, and gets talked about more. In tandem with our social media editor, breaking news has the power to quickly inform students about relevant events, as well as things that happen suddenly. East Lansing students are unique in the sense that many of them always want to know what is going on in the world around them, and being able to provide them that service is something we can do. Plus, it provides our staff more opportunities to write-- great for the many who finish their print and website stories early, and have nothing else to do. My first breaking news story was during the pandemic, when I was sitting at home listening to a press conference put on by Governor Whitmer about COVID-19 restrictions. I decided I wanted to write about it, a sort of recap, because some changes and extensions were relevant to my peers. I texted my adviser, and after it was approved, I wrote the rest of the story and got it on the site in the next few hours. We were both really excited-- Portrait had never published breaking news before, mainly because we had never had a website. While it wasn't widely read, I was happy with it. |
The website's first yearMy sophomore year, the website was the only thing we had. Like many other student papers, we made a shift to entirely online publishing, something that was hard for our staff. The Editor-in-Chief and our adviser restructured the way we ran everything, creating teams so that we could publish every day. Everything went on the site, or our Instagram. Nothing was particularly widely read, except by the people the stories were about, some friends and of course our own, ever-supportive families. We became used to the instant gratification of writing then publishing a story. We could see how many people read it, and people could leave comments for us. All of this made it all the more difficult to transition back to in-person school the next year, in addition to managing our print paper and new staff structure. |
Best of SNOThe company we use for our site, Student Newspapers Online (SNO), offers many services for student media outlets. One of them is an award system, consisting mostly of site-wide awards. However, SNO also provides us with the opportunity to submit stories that are "engaging, concise, and relevant" which also "provide context and provoke discussion," according to the submission criteria. I first submitted a story for Best of SNO my sophomore year, entitled, "Students and Specialists Express Optimism About Vaccines." It was after MIPA awards season, but we wanted to make sure the story got some recognition. So, we decided to try out Best of SNO for only the second time that year, with the first time being a photo story that won the award. A few days later, we found out-- it had been selected. I was really excited. Since then, I've worked to encourage staff to submit their online and print stories for Best of SNO. I attempted to integrate it into the website publishing process my junior year, but because of our small staff and overstretched editorial staff, we were never able to independently publish on the website. I continue to encourage my peers to submit for the recognition if they feel strongly about a story they wrote. |