Web and Social Media
On The Little Hawk, we post stories almost every single day. Each editor posts their own section—sports in Sports, news in News, etc. It's important for us to keep thelittlehawk.com up to date because we have a wide audience—in the past year, we have had 142,000 views with 117,000 stories read.
Web
Staff Photos
Each fall, we take new staff photos to display on our website. In previous years, we had done a staff photo style that was all black and white, but I didn't like how it looked, and of much of our staff agreed.
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Instead, this year, I came up with a new photo style. I had each member of the staff take a photo in front of City High, with a section of its brick wall as a background, and then lightly blur the background so that the headshot was the main focus.
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Note Martha, who's a little less serious than everyone else.
Merging Sections
Before this year, we had always had six individual sections: News, Arts and Entertainment, Opinion, Culture, Feature, and Sports. However, it was becoming hard to discern the difference between some of the sections, and our staff wasn't large enough to have enough editors to fill all of the section editor roles. This year, I decided to make a massive change and merge the Arts and Entertainment section with the News section and the Culture section with the Opinion section. The print issue of The Little Hawk still has a separate A&E and Culture section, as well as a separate A&E editor, but there are only four sections on the website. This change has allowed us to use our time to focus on having really good News and Opinion sections, as well as introducing the Games section.
In our print issues, we like to have classic newspaper games like Sudoku and crosswords for our readers to play. These are often the most popular part of the paper, and the reason many students pick one up. To increase traffic to the website, and in part due to the success of The New York Times Games, we decided to introduce the Games section on thelittlehawk.com.
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To create this page, I used the SNO Website Design Widgets, which I had never explored before. I created different sections for each game–the News Quiz takes the dominant role, with the Sudoku, Hawkle (our non-trademark infringing version of Wordle), and Martha's Mini Crossword sharing a line directly underneath. Under that are the rest of the puzzles.
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Each week, Martha, the News editor, creates games using AmuseLab's puzzle maker (this is also the same company that the New York Times and many other national newspapers use), and I paste the embed code into each widget section.
Social Media
The Little Hawk's social media strategy involves all three of our publications: The Little Hawk newspaper, Good Morning City High, and the Red and White Yearbook. When The Red and White or Good Morning City High Instagram accounts post something, they crosspost it on the Little Hawk newspaper account. This means that our viewers see everything from all of our publications on the @instalittlehawk account, but only see posts from Good Morning City High or the Red and White if they only follow those publications.
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On the @instalittlehawk account, our social media editor Ramy posts each story published on the web on Instagram. In past years, we've struggled with figuring out who has permission to post on social media, which has led to problems with communication and posts that don't reflect the views of The Little Hawk. However, having a designated social media editor (new this year) has helped with those issues.