One Friday every month, stacks and stacks of the Little Hawk newspaper lay in various places around the school. Students trip over each other in the hallways, faces buried in the ink. Maybe it’s just my biased point of view, but on those Fridays, it seems as if there’s a little bit more buzz, a little bit more excitement. Sometimes teachers even have to tell students to stop reading the paper…fancy that!
We have gotten great feedback about the first two issues of the 2011-12 school year. People have seemed to notice the new look. It is still the traditional newspaper layout, but updated a little bit. We’ve cleaned up the pages, and improved on the graphics and pictures. Big kudos to the designers, who are some of the most hardworking people on staff, staying long hours to finish making the pages look great.
The designers aren’t the only ones putting in long hours, however. If you were to stop by room 2109 any time in the week before the paper comes out, you’d find herds of hardworking, already stressed teenagers working diligently (well, most of the time…) on the sleek, glowing iMacs. There is a whole world hidden behind the flimsy pages of The Little Hawk. Almost every detail in the paper has been discussed, probably multiple times. Layouts are re-designed over and over again until the right look is achieved. Stories are re-written until the words flow just right. And pages are copy-edited ten times over. Oh, wait… backtrack. That’s where we get stuck. I will be the first to admit that in the past few years, The Little Hawk has been something less than perfect. The silly typos or the graphs that don’t add up to 100% (oops…that’s embarrassing) have not gone unnoticed by the staff. In order to give you an error-free paper, everything has to be ready to read through days in advance. This deadline issue is a pressing one. How do we get everyone’s stories done and pages designed on time? It’s still a mystery we’re trying desperately to solve. As our sleuthing yields results, I am confident that you will see errors quickly disappear.
There is another side to The Little Hawk, one a bit less traditional. If you’re reading this, you have obviously visited our new and improved website, thelittlehawk.com. It is not meant to replace the beloved print version, but to work together to provide more information, faster. We try to include things on the internet that you didn’t see in the paper, and which might help you understand the stories and the people in the stories just a little bit better. We have been a pioneer in Iowa high school newspaper podcasting, and have a super secret project in the making. So stay tuned!
There’s much to look forward to in print as well. The next issue of The Little Hawk will be new and exciting. We are looking at a whole different way of presenting the newspaper. As with everything in journalism, the new approach may be a flop, but we have extremely high hopes!
The staff has been working exceptionally hard this year. A combination of talent, dedication, and a little bit of good ol’ fashioned fun has made the beginning of this publication year a great one. Happy reading, everyone!
