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Strive for consistency and accountability.
Strive for consistency and accountability.
The proudest moment I had at the fall 2025 NHSJC/JEA convention was when I showed our website to the student sitting next to me. “You’re a club and you’ve done all of that? It looks professional!” she said. Over the past four years, we’ve strengthened our online presence with more consistent posting, and we’ve reorganized our website with more subcategories for easier navigation. The website allows us to cover stories with the timeliness a bimonthly print issue sometimes misses.
Before I started, the newspaper was contained in a Google Site with stories that disappeared once the reporter graduated. We’ve come a long way since then—in my sophomore year as managing editor of web, the website won first place at Student Keystone Media Awards, and then a year later, third place for schools with fewer than 1800 students at NHSJC.
Through the website, I’ve learned the importance of constant communication. For stories to go out online, editors need to edit within a couple days, and the managing editor of web and the social media editor need to coordinate a schedule to make sure every story is spotlighted.
Website
I had no idea that many parents cared about school board meetings until I attended this one. Granted, this was a school board meeting like no other, because we’d just had two principals in the district resign.
It was an incredibly charged meeting, and when we released the article a day later, my only hope was that neither side would find us terribly biased. It was exciting to write and publish stories a day after the event, especially during the summer. It made me realize that stories did not stop for anything. Fair coverage is important, but so is a quick turnaround.
I am very glad we didn’t let that story sit for a few months, because this was one that was extremely timely to our community.
Panther ‘Pinions and Weekly Reviews
Panther ‘Pinions and Weekly Reviews
This year, we’ve implemented Panther ‘Pinions and Weekly Reviews, two consistent columns to keep our online coverage spread throughout the school year.
It was primarily a response to a common critique that we had a habit of adding all of our latest issue’s articles onto the website at once and then going silent for a month.
We also wanted our staff members to gain more experience and confidence in writing opinions and reviews.
When we introduced the ‘Pinions and Weekly Reviews, our reporters were more eager to get started than I could have dreamed. I’m proud that we’ve been able to grow to a point where we can see frequent uploads to the site without having to urge someone to post something once a week.
Panther 'Pinions on our site from Nov.-Feb.
Reviews on our site from Dec.-Feb.
Social Media
In high school, I started to feel the pressure of not having social media. How did people know about all the events happening in the school all of the time? If I had a club, did the club really need to have an Instagram account just so that people would remember to attend the meetings? I finally downloaded it around two years ago...and it immediately sucked me in. There was so much information on there to consume all of the time. Some of it good, some of it bad. Most of it designed to catch your attention at any cost.
I didn't want our social media to be like that. Of course I hope students engage with the content we put out. But a headline alone should not be what they take away from it. Even if it means we won't always beat the short attention span, it's worth taking the time to put out accurate and thorough reporting on social media—especially on social media.
Our social media walks a careful tightrope between posting enough to catch people’s attention and not feeding scrolling addictions. Social media is inevitable, which I brush on in one of my columns from last year: “The pressure to have social media is not just on teenagers, though. Social media is how this modern society stays connected, and it can be difficult to stay involved without it.”
When I was scrolling through our social media, I noticed that many of our posts were geared for short attention spans. They didn’t entice the reader to learn more, and they didn’t really communicate much information past a headline and picture.
Gradually, over the past couple of years, we’ve included more context and more graphics in our posts. Walking that tightrope is difficult—we want to have fun graphics and short quotes for maximum readability, while making sure we don’t detract from the story itself.
Instagram post from Feburary 2024.
There's a strong, engaging image, and the headline is clear. There's even a quote on the next page.
But that's it. I don't know what the actual story is about.
The quote after it is too vague to understand on its own, but not interesting enough to make me want to go all the way to the link in bio.
Instagram post from December 2025.
This has an engaging image as well (and a strong subject). It also has the headline. Yet there's a distinct difference between this formatting and the formatting of a year ago.
Namely, it reads like a story. There are grafs to support the quotes, yet I'm still interested in learning more.
Our social media editor has been working on a guide to standardize the posting schedule and format so that anyone on our staff can do it. After he completed it this winter, I was the first to test run it.
As I went through it, I tried to put myself in the mindset of someone who was trying to upload for the first time. I did it by myself so I wouldn’t feel tempted to ask for help, and I took note of every time I felt confused or lost while sticking exactly to the steps written down.
Our social media editor has been responding to those comments and updating the guide accordingly, so we hope to have one of our freshmen reporters take a crack at it before the next issue comes out. It’s important to me that after he leaves, our social media posting quality and consistency doesn’t drop, and this guide is a huge step to making it sustainable.
Social Media Design for Panther Press.pdfThis was the first post I created using the guide. The most difficult part for me was finding pictures to put on every single slide. It was tempting to just not have a picture on every slide, but a huge part of any engaging social media post is having strong visuals.
It also forced me to have the mindset of your average Haven student, someone who's just scrolling through their feed. Suddenly, I became more aware of the shortfalls, like how anything more than three sentences felt too long, and the text seemed too small on the screen. While this is a great start, we're going to continue tweaking our model as we get more student feedback to maximize readability.
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