One thing I understood from the very beginning—and there weren’t a lot of those—was the importance of social media and the danger of not using it right. I’m a teenage student. I am the audience we’re trying to reach. I knew no one was going to type thenewtonite.com into their browser, click enter, and scroll through for a story. That’s too many steps for today’s attention spans. We live in a TikTok-ified world, so if content isn’t in front of someone within seconds, it might as well not exist.

At the start of my first volume as EIC, our Instagram had just 850 followers. Not terrible, but not great, especially for a decade-old account that had been hovering in the 800s for years. We wanted to get to 1,000 followers by the end of the year. A small, achievable step in boosting our presence, but it quickly turned into something much bigger.

I started with the basics. Every story we posted on the website went straight to our Instagram story, with a headline, a photo, and—most importantly—a convenient little link. Just one button. One click that could take someone directly to the full story, no extra steps. And it worked. Our website traffic increased, but social media needed more than just consistency, it needed strategy.

That’s when I knew we needed a dedicated social media manager. Before, posting to Instagram had been treated like an afterthought, something we did if we remembered or had time. But social media is the front door to any publication now, it’s how people find your stories, engage with them, and decide whether they care enough to click through. Having someone fully in charge of that process meant posts could go up in real-time, with intention and creativity, rather than as an afterthought.

I got serious about learning what worked. At the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Conference, I attended sessions on the role of social media in journalism and learned how visual appeal, frequency, and interactivity directly impact engagement. I came back from that conference buzzing with ideas and ready to overhaul our entire approach.

The first step was creating a dedicated social media role, ensuring that breaking news, sports scores, and feature stories were posted quickly and effectively. Then, we revamped our graphics—goodbye generic templates and hello bold, eye-catching designs. We made the Instagram grid more cohesive and visually appealing, so it didn’t just feel like a random collection of posts but a thoughtfully curated feed.

We also shifted our focus from just posting articles to creating interactive content—Instagram stories with polls, behind-the-scenes photos, live updates, and Q&A sessions with reporters. Suddenly, The Newtonite wasn’t just a newspaper students glanced at once in a while—it was part of their daily scroll.

The impact? Our follower count skyrocketed—from 850 to over 1,450. A massive jump, especially for an account that had plateaued for years. But more importantly, the engagement exploded. Our posts were getting more likes, shares, and comments, and students were actually clicking through to read full articles.

One of my favorite moments was the Newton Boys Soccer team’s Division 1 Championship win. In the final 30 seconds of the game, I was on a three-way call with Gabe, our photographer, and Nadia, our social media manager. We were frantically coordinating: Gabe snapping action shots, Nadia prepping the Instagram post, and me drafting the headline. The second the final whistle blew, we posted a photo and a breaking news caption, “Originally 31st Seed, Boys' Soccer Wins Division 1 Championship,” That post got 660 likes, our second highest ever.

But it wasn’t just about the numbers. The shift in our social media strategy changed how The Newtonite functioned as a publication. Before, our stories often felt delayed, like we were constantly playing catch-up. Now, we were timely, interactive, and present. We weren’t waiting for people to come to us—we were meeting them where they already were, on their phones, scrolling through Instagram between classes.

All of our social media work immediately contributed to our website traffic, especially during the strike, while we were publishing 3 articles a day, supplemented with other Instagram stories and posts to break shorter updates. Stories like "Controversy surrounds NPS Instagram posts criticizing teachers’ strike" did particularly  well, where we broke the story before the Boston Globe did.