As a natural consequence of my generation being much less extroverted, many staff feel afraid to speak to and learn about students they do not know. To make sure our publication covers as many different students as possible, and can cover our entire student population, I established new weekly stories called 'Athlete of the Week' and 'Feature of the Week.' These are short features that rotate through the staff, and require the writer to find someone they do not know and learn about them. I firmly believe that everyone has a story, so these formats are a way to tell stories from a more diverse population, not just higher-profile students.

Another opportunity to improve the diversity of our coverage is through covering local events in the community, not just those within the building. Most recently, we had a student cover a local Martin Luther King Day parade, which also had attendance of students from the school CURLS club - providing more coverage for students who are not white, which is the overwhelming majority of Wando High School.

Our staff is composed of a variety of political opinions, genders, and ethnicities. Whenever we plan future issues, staff editorials, or angles for stories, we make sure to place importance on including everyone. For example, we wrote a staff editorial on the situation in Minneapolis, and in that editors' meeting, we heard from editors who are pro-Trump, anti-Trump, female, male, black, and white.

Bouncing off the 'Stories of the Week' piece, part of my approach to leading a staff has been to be borderline annoying to my staffers in reminding them that everyone has a story. We have interviewed students at every grade level, men, women, non-binary people, white people, black people, Latinos, and those with Middle Eastern heritage - amongst others. Diversity of coverage makes our publication appealing to as many people as possible.

Part of why I place such a strong emphasis on our efforts to commit to diversity is the lack of diversity at Wando. The vast majority of our population is white, and as a result, making sure that our publication is one built for everyone's consumption can be difficult. Wando is located in a suburban, affluent city, so our staff has to be intentional about how they work to maintain social, ethnic, racial, and economic diversity in their work.