Twitter

Over the last three years, I have contributed to running our main social media: Twitter. Although I have worked less with it this year because of our new social media editor position, using twitter to connect with students has always been a goal of mine. Content on our twitter ranges from retweets of other DGN accounts to links to articles online to real-time videos. Our number of followers has grown steadily with our frequency of posts.

Live tweeting and promoting on Twitter

A good example of using twitter to connect and contact the student body quickly is our senior issue reminders. Every year, we create an 8 page "senior issue" insert in the May edition of the paper. This includes a map of were seniors plan on attending college, senior superlative results, senior reflections, etc. By the end of senior year many seniors forget to check their emails and miss the opportunity to be a part of this. To help remind seniors, I tweeted out a series of reminders about deadlines. Pictures of the tweets are below.
Along with reminders, I also used our twitter to post short, timely videos. The one example is a video of our former principal doing the "I believe" chant at our last pep assembly of the year. The principal was known for doing the chant with us and the video had lots of retweets and favorites. The second example is a video of a teacher at DGN being surprised with the Golden Apple award. I was at the event with a fellow editor and had her send me the video so I could post it quickly and break the story on the Omega twitter.

The link to the "I believe" video can be found here and the link to the Golden Apple Award video can be found here

Promoting Journalism in Classes

Each year before registration for classes, editors from the newspaper go to English classes and make short presentations about the journalism program. My sophomore and junior year, I was in charge of contacting teachers to set up times to visit their classes and creating a schedule that matched up editors available periods with teachers classes. I also created a short list of things to talk about in the presentations. There is no concrete data to prove it, but it is quite obvious in the class enrollment every year that a decent amount of students in journalism 1 and 2 are recruited during these presentations. Below are links to the of the documents I created for the presentations and the recruitment handout. 

Link to recruitment organizer    Link to talking points