The web’s top student sites
What makes for a successful student newspaper online?
by Gary Clites
Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund's Adviser Update, Winter 2007
What makes a great online student newspaper? For the answer, one can look at award-winning sites, but the reality is that what wins awards is not necessarily always what makes a paper popular with visitors. In an academic environment in which most online schools use ASNE’s terrific myhighschooljournalism.org to build their sites, the question might seem somewhat moot, since the template system ASNE uses brings a certain sameness to all their sponsored publications.
There are, however, still schools that build their websites the old-fashioned way. And there is a way to gauge their popularity. Yahoo’s directory of online student newspapers at dir.yahoo.com/Education/K_12/Newspapers/Individual_School_Papers is a great way to find sites. It also keeps track of their popularity based upon the number of times each has been accessed through Yahoo. A look at the top websites in that listing offers some clear indications of what makes a successful online publication.
For the record, the top five student newspaper sites according to Yahoo at press time (September 2006) were:
1. Silver Chips Online, Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Springs, MD
2. The Paly Voice, Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA
3. The Lowell, Lowell High School, San Francisco, CA
4. The Hi-Lite Online, Carmel High School, Carmel, IA
5. The Gaylesville Enterprise, Gaylesville School, Gaylesville, AL,
At the time of this writing, The Gaylesville Enterprise (www.pacers.org/schools/gaylesville/enterprise.html) was temporarily offline, but the characteristics that make the other top websites successful are fairly obvious.
All four active sites are very clean and professional looking in terms of overall design. Silver Chips (silverchips.mbhs.edu), for example, features a classy header at the top incorporating the title in interesting graphics of the text fading into a neatly Photoshopped photo of the front of the school. Both sides of the main page feature key information in thin, neat columns. On the left are menu links to all the site’s sections and features (which are extensive); on the right are special features like “Track Reviews,” links to an online poll with the key question featured, and highlighted sports and entertainment stories. In the center are links to three top stories and an attention grabbing photo.
The Paly Voice’s (voice.paly.net) homepage is more content rich, with similar columns down the two sides, but featuring lead paragraph links to many more stories on the top page. With a clean design featuring a green on white visual theme, the page looks bright and inviting. Photos are smaller, but provide clear visual keys to the stories inside.
The Lowell (www.thelowell.org) offers a cool page header featuring the school’s logo married to a photo of the architecturally interesting front of their school. Rail thin menus line the page, and the links inside through the center are offset by interesting photos and illustrations of key stories. Clearly, these are chosen for visual excitement. When I visited, they included shots of vandalized picnic tables on campus and clothing strategically arranged in a local thrift shop which is raising money to support the school’s afterschool programs. Overall, the effect is to make the idea of clicking in inviting and exciting.
The Hi Lite Online (www.hilite.org) offers similar rail menus on each side (the one feature all four sites share), but is much more modern-looking, with interesting graphics combined with down-style heads and a neat, almost Nickelodeon-inspired attitude to the design (if you have kids, you’ll know what I mean. The site combines a positive use of white space with cool blue graphics in various shades and, at least when I visited, photos which picked up those colors to form a uniform introduction to the contents.
Homepages are only one part of a website. Principally, an examination of the contents indicates that all these sites offer solid journalism in an attractive package. Most of the sites go beyond the schoolhouse walls to feature serious content about their communities. Silver Chips featured stories about immigration rallies in nearby Washington, DC; a preseason look at the local Washington Redskins team; and a poll on upcoming local elections. The Lowell covered local anti-war protests and people forced to leave the country to find affordable medical care.
Winning sites also include features that look beyond the classroom. The HiLite Online features everything from a Community Calendar to local street maps making the site more than just a school information center. Silver Chips’ entertainment coverage offers reviews of new movies online immediately after their openings, making the site worthwhile to anyone interested in what to do on a weekend night.
Timeliness is another key to the success of most of these sites. It is clear that these staffs use their websites to keep readers up-to-date between publication of their print editions. The Silver Chips homepage features links to their “Most Recent” stories - articles that have been posted since the last print edition of the paper. At press time, these stories were posted as late as the day I visited. The Paly Voice also offers last-minute posting of fresh stories, along with a neat roll of all the latest sports scores in the right rail which surely contributes to making the site crucial to their local community.
Two of these sites also act as gateways to additional journalistic school content. The Paly Voice offers neat digital video feeds of stories from their school’s broadcasting class’ television show in web-friendly Quicktime format. Among other things, this would allow parents to access video content that would otherwise be impossible for them to see. I easy access to the school’s 24-hour full service radio station, WHJE. A click of the button offers visitors a live Internet feed of the station’s programming and builds the audience for their fellow journalism student’s work.
Overall, these top sites feature a clean, professional look. Their design is carefully thought-out and attractive. The sites are content rich with material that goes beyond the schoolhouse walls to encompass student and community life in ways that make them a vital journalistic link between the school and community. Anyone interested in building a significant web presence should take the time to visit and study these successful student sites.
© Gary Clites, 2007