Marketing & Audience Engagement
Marketing helps get more eyeballs on your stories, making sure everyone knows where the real buzz is at and encouraging more folks to dive into your paper for all the cool happenings and stories you've got lined up!
Overview of Process Selling Subscriptions
Fresh Papers Right on Your Doorstep
The Southerner has historically always funded through a subscription process. Each staff member is responsible for getting 10+ subscriptions, each priced at 40 dollars, where subscribers receive a paper a month at their doorstep throughout the school year. This process takes a lot of time for every staff member, but properly funds our paper production along with online programming such as Adobe packages, ownership of our website, and Sno Flow services to organize our stories and apply to awards.
Distributing Papers throughout Schools
Everywhere You Look!
Once we create the paper, we not only distribute it to those with subscriptions, but buy excess to put in every classroom and hallways of the school. This increases readership as students and staff can access our best articles of the month in every corner of the school. Sometimes we get creative in where we leave them!
Recruiting New Staff Members at Freshman Orientation
Join the Journalism Pathway!
Every year, we set up a large booth strewn with past papers and awards that we have won to encourage rising high school students to enroll in Journalism 1 and become a part of our great program! This initial energy is so important because journalism can eba hard activity to break into because it is unlike any other type of writing. You have to market it as something acclaimed but also approachable for new students.
Social Media Engagement
Weekly Thursday Trivia & More
To engage through social media (Instagram Stories), we have a weekly trivia run by the comment section that is a super big hit! It get hundreds of players every Thursday for the relevant exciting theme . I personally gather in little huddles with my friends and we all see who can get the most right :)
Humans of Midtown
Community Engagement with Familiar Faces on the Website
Through our website, we draw readership by doing a series called “Humans of Midtown.” These are short profiles on people around the school, inspired by the phenomenal Humans of New York series. By having students, their friends, and their teachers highlighted in our very website and paper, it greatly increases readership. These are posted consistently everyday to highlight as many people as possible.
Streamline Process to Pay for Subscriptions
Looking Forward: The Easier the Process, More Subscriptions
Additionally, right now the process to buy subscriptions can be a little complicated and I would love to look into how to streamline it this year. I believe this probably deters people from buying subscriptions in some cases so it’s very important to look into. I would love to see if we could link payment to Paypal or Venmo too so that it could be easier for students to buy subscriptions.
Increasing Interactive Experience
Looking Forward: Polls for Fun, Relevant Subjects
Regarding social media, I think we could amplify our reach by engaging in more interactive ways because there has been such great response from our Trivia series. Some ideas I currently have are online competitions for best halloween costumes, festive decorations, and food in the school and surrounding neighborhoods. This could create a whole other interactive part of our online presence, and really draw people back to see results. This can be done through the poll features on Instagram stories or online polls such as Survey Monkey.