Mitch Ziegler, CJE

Mitch Ziegler is the retired adviser of The Pilot yearbook and The High Tide newspaper at Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California. Mitch currently serves as the JEA California State Director.

I was incredibly successful in recruiting strong writers to my journalism program. The key was to use the middle school feeder programs. Our school did not have a required ninth grade social studies course, and I realized that I needed to recruit students early. Their 10th grade schedules were impacted by social studies in tenth grade, and they were becoming unwilling to enroll in a zero period class. We are a K-12 district, so our information systems had all students, and I had contacts among the middle school teachers. I asked each teacher to recommend their ten best students for journalism. Then I sent a letter to the students at school, and a letter home to the parents. I had talked to admissions counselors at a number of Ivy League schools, such as Stanford and Harvard, and they told me how much they valued publication experience. What impressed them was that students earned their positions, as opposed to the popularity contest of a student government election. I also talked about how the programs were more like a sports team, with everyone having the same goal. I talked about how students enjoyed the program, and I used data about how many students stayed in the program for three and four years.

I sent letters to about 50 students. In some years half of those students joined the newspaper and yearbook. We did not have an intro class. I generally preferred that the students join newspaper first, because the class was more structured, and they mostly were writers. It was easy to transition to yearbook the following year. My class was pretty divided for the first six weeks – I ran a boot camp for the new students, and my editors were responsible for creating three issues of the newspaper – we published every two weeks. The new students were teamed up with experienced writers for the fourth issue, and they were writing their own stories for the fifth. We typically published 16 times a year. For the fifth issue, I went over each story with the writer. By February, the new students were often our best reporters because they were willing to go above and beyond is researching stories.

The biggest shortcoming to this process was that I focused on mainly strong students in my recruiting. Without an intro program, however, I needed students who would quickly become proficient. I also never said no to any student who wanted to join the program. During my last seven years I was able to recruit a more diverse group of students through my photography classes. These students were often unsuccessful in tradition academic setting, but they often thrived at the visual. While these students joined the program as photographers, a fair number also began to write stories. They were usually juniors or seniors, and their relative maturity made them more adept at reporting than they imagined.