Marketing and Audience Engagement

Early in my time working on The Howler, I remember a student saying something that stuck with me: “Nobody is going to read that.” The comment was casual, but it reflected a perception that student journalism often faces—that the work we produce will go unnoticed. This motivated me to focus on marketing our newspaper. Part of my responsibility as not only an editor, but as a journalist, was to prove this student wrong. Strong reporting is only impactful if it reaches the audience it is meant to inform. Because of this, I have worked to prioritize marketing and audience engagement alongside the reporting process.

When Wake County considered banning the SNO publishing platform used by many student newspapers, I worked to engage our audience and raise awareness about the issue. Through social media posts, graphics, and outreach, I encouraged students, alumni, and community members to support student journalism by signing a petition. These efforts helped generate over 1,000 signatures before the school board meeting, demonstrating strong community support for student publications. This experience showed me that audience engagement can extend beyond promoting stories, as it can also help advocate for the future of student journalism.

Our newspaper uses the platform Intuit Mailchimp to track our viewership each month. There is a widget on our website where viewers can sign up to receive a weekly newsletter. In this newsletter, there are all the new stories published from that week. This is a good way to keep our viewers up to date with all the articles we put out. Through this platform, we can also see statistics of audience increases/decreases, and the total number of people signed up for our newsletter. This is a good way for me to track our viewership. Any increase in readers is a good increase in readers!