Web and Social Media
Photo by River Boyle
Media promotion, especially in this generation is vital to having your published work shared in the community. For high school students especially because they rely on their phones to give them a rundown on what's going on in the world.
When the Trail has new stories, accomplishments, or fundraisers, I use social media to inform students and teachers of things happening on campus that they might not be aware of. Such as a teen content creator with thousands of followers that may just be sitting next to them in class.
SNO Layouts
I enjoy organizing my stories in a layout that has some sort of content with each scroll so I don’t bore the reader. I usually use features such as related stories, pull quotes and infoboxes to provide readers with more details and more stories. They may read a story that gives context.
Long-Form
I enjoy organizing my stories in a layout that has some sort of content with each scroll so I don’t bore the reader. I usually use features such as related stories, pull quotes and infoboxes to provide readers with more details and more stories. They may read a story that gives context.
Immersive half photo
I use this layout for the majority of my stories because to me it looks very clean and makes it easy to incorporate elements without having any weird paragraph sizings. Immersive photo is a great layout for horizontal photos with big subjects because it enlarges the photo above the headline, which has really come in handy for some of the Trail’s stories.
Social Media Promotion
I use our social media to its advantage by constantly promoting our newest stories and celebrating our accolades. No matter how many times you say “click the link in our bio!” traffic seems to stay the same. The only effective method I’ve found is constantly having staff and me post on their socials and hyperlink our site. By doing this, our staff was able to get a couple of thousand views in just a couple of days before we needed to submit for a SNO badge. I post Instagram stories on my work for the Trail because I want people to put their eyes on my work. I want people to engage with the stories I’m telling.
Social Media Storytelling
Social media is for the stories that are breaking or stories that I want more public interaction with. I like to post club meetings on social platforms to promote student organizations and encourage students to be active on campus. I also use social media to break stories, for example, our county was under a tornado warning and issued an early release from school. The storm hit sooner than we thought, and students had to stay sitting up against the wall in the hallways for well past the time we got out of school.
