This year's freshman issue wasn't the first we've ever made, but it was the first in at least five years, so it might as well have been.

Making this issue involved a lot of collaboration: I worked with our school's administration to fund and distribute the issue, with clubs from across our school to sell and design ads, and, of course, with my fellow staffers to actually make the issue. 

I believe this issue was a triumph of engagement: we got it into the hands of every single freshman, introducing them not only to our paper, but to the school and to the clubs of the building as well. By providing them with this resource, we put our name in their head, in the hope that they would be more likely to pick up a full issue when they came out.

You can find the full issue here.

For just about every month this year, we've posted a print issue preview to our socual media, designed both to inform students that our issue has come out and to encourage them to check them out. I think these are a great way to boost readership and to get people excited about reading our paper, so I'm very happy that I made it a point at the start of this year to make these previews.

Find an example here.

Another way that I have attempted to foster audience engagement this year is via a readership survey. This survey was designed to provide us feedback on where people picked up our print issues, what they actually read in the paper and what they wanted to see most in the future. These responses would allow us to better allocate our papers around the school building and to understand what people really liked so we could give them more of it.

This survey appeared in our November 2023 print issue, here.

As long as I've been on staff, I've been helping to run our paper's recruitment tables at our school's 8th Grade Nights where incoming freshman come to our school to learn about clubs, sports and academics.

My pitch to incoming students and parents always begins with telling them what our paper is, and how they can read it; I believe that recruiting readership is vital to the health of our paper, so I chose to lead with the "why to read" over the "why to join." I work at these events to highlight the diversity of our coverage both in-print and online, offering up content that will engage both parents (news, sports) and students (profiles, features, opinions, sports), and connecting them to our twitter and Instagram accounts.