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The news is, ultimately, a business. We write stories, but we only have the platform that we do because people read them. It is my responsibility as an editor to bring tjTODAY to our potentital readers.
DISTRIBUTION
Over 1000 magazines have arrived. It is my responsibility to get tjTODAY in front of our potential readers. Here is how we do it:
Because all students have lunch at the same time at my school, distribution takes place during lunch. Students sit in hallways throughout the school, and every tjTODAY staffer will grab a stack of magazines to pass out.
On distribution day, we will take the 1000+ magazines out of their boxes and split into stacks. During lunch, every staffer will grab at least one stack to distribute at their designated location.
Students eat lunch in Franklin Commons —typically, seniors sit in this area of the school.
Students eat lunch in Turning Commons—typically freshmen sit in this area of the school
Everyone has a designated location to distribute their magazines at (left).
Once they pick up a stack, they write their name on the board to receive credit for distributing (below).
Before distribution begins, I always take a second to remind people of a few things:
Talk to everyone: They should be stopping every single person they walk past and asking, "Would you like a copy of tjTODAY?"
Don't take it personally: Every so often, people will, kindly and not-so-kindly, reject the offer. That's okay, move on.
Pay attention: Look at how people react to different spreads and which stories catch their attention.
I have found that distribution forced me out of my shell as an underclassman. When you have a stack of 40 magazines to hand out before you can start eating your lunch, you get over your fears of talking to people quite quickly.
Distributing like this also helps cement our place within the Jefferson community. Everyone in the school—students and staff alike—knows when it is distribution day. There are dozens of students walking the hallways with stacks and stacks of magazines; on top of that, students sit in every corner of the school with magazines surrounding them. It is not possible to get through a distribution day lunch without knowing distribution is happening.
Another benefit to having distribution work this way is we get to see the first reactions of our audience in person. My favorite part of distribution day is seeing which spreads people will flip to first, which spreads they gasp at or laugh at or turn to a friend to talk about. When walking around the school for the 40 minutes that is the lunch block, I see the initial reactions when flipping through the pages and the longer, drawn-out reaction after reading each story.
That being said, there are always a few students who are absent, don't receive a copy or want one for their parents. I personally know some teachers and students whose families are regular readers of tjTODAY.
We place the remaining extra copies in this metal stand outside Nobel staircase. Front and center in the most highly-trafficked area of the school, everyone sees this stand. In my four years on staff, I have never seen an extra copy of the magazine still in the stand by the time the next issue distribution comes along.
Before stacking the magazines or beginning to plan distirbution, we will take 40 magazines to set in storage in the TJ Media closet. These are here for safe keeping alongside copies of tjTODAY dating back to the 1980s.
After lunch, during 8th period—my school's built-in time for typical after-school activities during the school day—I will walk around the school with a few fellow staffers and grab magazines left hanging around. Our peers like to have fun with them sometimes, putting them up on shelves and windows.
Once we collect all of them, we head back to the classroom, grab whatever is remaining, and head off to place them in busy areas around the school.
We set out a few magazines in the front office for parents and visitors who may want to snag a copy
We keep between 20-40 copies of each magazine inside the TJ Media classroom. Sometimes we need a past copy on hand while working on the next issue; we also hand these out at the beginning of the year during interest meetings.
We will leave a few magaznies in the library front table as well. Pictured here also two copies of the past issue.
A few days after distribution, every article will be published on the online website, tjTODAY.org. This ensures our publication and work can be reached by people even if they are not students or faculty members at Jefferson.
To the left are all of the stories that were in the 2024 November political issue, published on the website after distribution.
MARKETING & RECRUITMENT
My high school is a magnet school, meaning students come from across over four different counties. Therefore, there is a weak link between recruiting to middle schools for all clubs at Jefferson. At the beginning of the year, an activity fair is put on, where clubs sign up for a booth and the freshmen are given an 8th period block to walk around and explore.
This year, we took our "STAND OUT" poster and set up booths for tjTODAY, Techniques (yearbook) and TJTV News (broadcast). We brought our cameras to both cover the event and entice new freshmen to come by.
We also had a stack of old magazines that we handed out to freshmen who stopped to talk to us.
This year, I took photos of the freshmen present at the event who were already in the class. If they stopped by, I grabbed a photo of them with a magazine. In the next class, we had a good laugh over the pictures.
(Click the arrow to see more photos.)
We treat recruitment as a group, as TJ Media, rather than individual publications. All of the funding for tjTODAY, TJTV News and our equipment comes from yearbook profits. The more dedicated members we have in TJ Media as a whole, the better.
This is even more important considering that all the funding for TJ Media comes from yearbook proceeds. Regardless of how well-awarded tjTODAY is or how often people watch the TJTV News video features, we won't have the funding to publish a magazine or buy equipment without the yearbook. A strong front as TJ Media, rather than individual publications, is vital. We are also very interchangeable across staff. I have worked on all four current TJ Media publications—tjTODAY, TJTV News, Techniques (the yearbook) and tjTALKS (the podcast). Many editors and staff members can say the same.
We are one TJ Media.
Beyond recruitment, it is important to ensure the current staffers want to stick with the program. When people hear about a publication where everyone has a good time and enjoys working on it, they are more open to picking up the work that comes out of that publication.
To read more about my process to help people stick with the program, head to Editing, Leadership & Team Building, specifically the "Team Building" section.
ANALYTICS
Social Media
Because all our funding is directly the result of yearbook proceeds, our social media presence is incredibly important. People can only purchase the yearbook if they know it exists, and people will only want to purchase it if they know it is of high quality.
During Homecoming week 2024, I switched our Instagram account from a regular one to a professional account—therefore, I am now able to see and access the analytics of how the TJ Media Instagram account fares.
We have had a net gain of 27 followers in the past 90 days totalling to 1,118 followers as of Feb. 14.
Approximately half of our 28,723 views in the past three months have been accounts that follow TJ Media, and approximately half that do not.
Based on those analytics, I understand a few things about our Instagram page, the first and foremost being that this is the best platform to reach an audience outside of Jefferson (as almost half of all views are from non-followers). This also means that we have a fairly strong yield with our current following—we get approximately 14,000 views from accounts that follow us, and we have 1,000 followers.
Additionally, the most common age range of people who follow TJ Media are young—surprisingly, there are more 18-24 than 13-17, likely because of the alumni network. This taught me that there is a strong presence of Jefferson graduates who still keep up with school news and want to know what's going on.
The middle graph taught me when to prioritize posts. Throughout the week, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are the best days to post news, and Mondays the worst. While this is something I take into account when planning and scheduling, that does not mean I refuse to post on Monday. That also being said, we will often create posts that we schedule to be published at different times, based on this data.
This data was the most interesting to see: overall views for our account. It was fascinating to me that despite having this Instagram for many, many years, the top 12 viewed posts all went up during the 2024-2025 school year.
This data reaffirmed a belief I already had from conversation—that Homecoming week is the time when we get our most interaction, totaling at 17,332 views for one post and over 50,000 views for posts about Homecoming week.
Something I learned from this data that was unexpected last fall was the demand for breaking news. In the past, the Instagram account was used to promote content that had already been written and published elsewhere. However, the posts about Dr. Bonitatibus announcing her departure, Mr. Mukai being announced the new principal, and the gallery of how students adjusted to a power outage were all amongst the top 10 most-viewed posts.
This data shaped how I used social media for the rest of the year. We continued posting about stories that were already written, but also added breaking news posts when events arose.
Most of our views come from posts, not stories and reels
This further affirmed my understanding of TJ Media's brand within the Jefferson community—people cared about the photos we take and publish
Moments before we hit 1,000 followers on Instagram, during Homecoming week. We are currently hundreds past that.
This data from three of the top four posts with the most views showed me something interesting. The posts that have high view counts have very high margins of non-followers viewing posts. That meant to balance out the proportions to end up with a 50-50 split total, most of the viewers for our other posts must be followers.
Thus, our high-profile news coverage that affects the greater Jefferson community, including Homecoming events and considerable changes to administration, reach a large audience, while our day-to-day coverage typically reaches current Jefferson students, teachers and parents. Therefore, I have begun to target our coverage even more strongly to be tailored to the Jefferson community. Every post that goes on social media is something that we believe current students, parents and teachers will be affected by and care about, regardless of what the greater county, state or nation is currently discussing.
Website
SNO lost a lot of data over the past few years, so I am unable to access data prior to March 2023. However, using the same range with different years, I can look at the start of the school year until the beginning of February. From last year to this year, we increased from 45,942 page views to 65,487. Additionally, we increased from 51,178 stories read to 72,219.
Within the last 30 days, we had 9,315 unique users, and an average session time of 130.97 seconds—this means that most readers are taking at least two minutes when they open the website to skim a story or two.
This data establishes that publishing the print articles online was the right move—according to all site data, the highest viewed tag was "current print issue." From then on, we have been consistently publishing our print articles to the tjTODAY website.
I value ease of communication between audience and publication.
This form allows readers to submit a Letter to the Editor on the tjTODAY website.
A form that we created to hear from our audience, directly asking what content they want from us.
The results from the TJ Media Preference Form underscored something I learned from looking at the social media analytics. This individual asked for more school-related news that students might not have known about. They specifically used the principal leaving as an example, which was the post that also showed me our audience wanted more breaking news coverage on social media.
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