MARKETING & AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
Audience engagement is just as crucial as reporting itself. A story can be groundbreaking, but if no one reads it, its impact is lost. Throughout my time at The Stinger, I’ve worked to expand our reach beyond the walls of Emmaus High School — ensuring our work sparks conversations in the wider community. I’ve focused on making sure our journalism reaches the people who need it most, while ensuring our paper has the funds we need to continue printing.
Social Media Polls
Social media polls have been proven to be one of the most effective ways of getting our audience to engage with us. Every month, as part of our Arts & Culture section, we amass hundreds of responses from our students on what movies, music, and media they’re currently interested in.
Read one of our September poll stories here.
To effectively deal with this growing excitement with polls, I crafted a policy to ensure at least some validity to the data while not being excessively encumbering to our reporters:
"At least 120 responses are required in order for a school-wide survey to be used as legitimate data for any story. Ideally, writers, reporters, and editors should aim for 300 or more responses, in order to get a somewhat accurate sampling of Emmaus High School's 3,500+ student body."
Since establishing this standard, I've allowed our writers to conduct surveys to gather data on important topics like the use of artificial intelligence in schools, how social media impacts relationships, and more.
See some of our surveys below:
This is a currently ongoing survey being used for an in-depth maestro project on how social media affects teenage relationships and teen mental health in our community specifically. This is one among numerous surveys we've done for in-depth stories.
To boost audience engagement, we send out polls every month from our Arts & Culture section with a certain theme for that issue. October's poll of popular Halloween movies reflected extensive community engagement. I've directed our editors to continue this practice due to its popularity.
Advertising
Unsurprisingly, running a newspaper is extremely expensive. Since all our content —print and online — is free of charge, we don’t profit off of that. Thankfully, our administration pays for our printing costs, but everything else we’re responsible for. Our main sources of income are advertisements, the occasional fundraiser, and donations, which we use to fund:
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Our website
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Field trips to different competitions and journalism conventions, including to NSPA
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Competition entry costs
Over the past two years, I organized our advertisers into one handy spreadsheet, which we now are able to easily cross-reference every issue instead of every editor trying to remember which ads went in what issue.
Select information is redacted from the sheet here for client confidentiality reasons, but our sheet offers a comprehensive guide for all staff members working on the issue.
Additionally, in my first year as editor-in-chief and co-business manager, I increased our advertising revenue by 274% from $500 to $1,370. I did this by reaching out to more than two dozen businesses and explaining our mission — many were happy to support student-driven media.
By working with the rest of the staff to raise money, almost everyone has become a salesperson. I’m proud to say that this year alone, we’ve made $1,530, a more than 112% increase from last year.
Distribution
With our current printing budget, The Stinger manages to print about 500-600 copies every issue, which are then circulated among the students, staff, and wider community through local businesses.
One change we made to make The Stinger more accessible was moving one of our green distribution boxes to the library, a popular hang-out spot for many students.
Now, our boxes are located outside our newsroom, in the high school main entrance, and the library. Within days of restocking, every paper is gone now.
We also make sure that whenever someone features in our paper, they get a copy, no matter how far away they may be...
Pennsylvania Gov. Shapiro picks up a copy of the September issue of The Stinger about a month after signing the historic Pennsylvania Education Budget at Emmaus High School on Sept. 5, 2024. Photo courtesy of Commonwealth Media.
Stinger Rebranding
This past December marked the 50th anniversary of our newspaper in its current form as The Stinger (from 1921-1974 it was known as the E-Hive). To celebrate the special occasion, I worked with our News Editor and Head Illustrator to come up with a new, modern logo and banner for our paper.
Check out our front cover from two years ago and then see our latest front cover
(December 2024). Making our banner larger and more visual resulted in renewed interest in our paper and more copies picked up by students.