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MARKETING & ENGAGEMENT
When it comes to being a self-funded publication, both marketing and engagement are important, as it's how we're able to continue producing content for our website and print magazine. Over the years, we have utilized a variety of methods to increase and maintain readership while raising money for our publication, which you'll see throughout this section of my portfolio.
Recruitment
Each year, our publication reaches out to both teachers and students in an effort to find people who are interested or would make a good fit in our program. Part of how we do this is through a survey, where teachers can recommend a student whom they believe exemplifies aspects we're looking for.
Each year, we revise and send out a staff recommendation form, where teachers at our school can recommend students they think would be a good fit for journalism. In previous years, we have received up to 70 responses, and for all students recommended, we hand write and mail a letter to them.
Once we finish collecting responses, we move on to the letter phase, where we write to each student recommended in the survey. Every leadership staffer will participate by writing a letter informing the student about our publication.
Rough outline of the handwritten letters we send out to students.
We also mail a flyer containing more information about the program, benefits of taking journalism, and a separate letter from the EIC about all the things we do. I brought it upon myself to create a new flyer with updated information to accurately reflect The Cougar Chronicle. When everything is ready, we put both papers in an envelope to be mailed out the specific student's home.
I've noticed these letters do bring students into our class that helps us maintain enough staffers to thrive as a publication.
This is the flyer included in the letters we send out to students.
"I got a letter in the mail, and I opened it. ...I usually don't get letters, so I was like, 'who sent me a letter?' Open it up and it said, The Cougar Chronicle. I didn't know what that was, and I read more into it and realized that it was a class, which is exactly what I've been wanting to do since I was little. I would read the news, I would watch the news, and at the time I didn't know what it was called. I didn't know it was called journalism. [But] as I read more about The Cougar Chronicle, it was an awakening because I knew it was exactly what I had wanted to do for a while."
- Justin Majette, Sports Editor
This is the form I sent out to every teacher at CKHS in hopes they would post it in their Google Classroom. We ended up with a total of 13 responses.
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The Journalism Workshop Club
Since Journalism 1 is part of the full class, new staffers go through two months of bootcamp before they are thrown into production, where they are expected to write articles for our website. Usually by the semester mark, we lose around half of our Journalism 1 staffers because they feel they aren't prepared enough to continue. With this in mind, I decided to create The Journalism Workshop Club, where students who are interested can participate without having to fully commit to the class.
To get started, I created an interest survey to see how many students would participate. While I waited for responses, I found two leadership staffers who were willing to help create a curriculum and plan for the club. Once I had an idea of what I was doing, I started the long process to get the club approved by the school, which took around 2 1/2 weeks.
With very little time in class and after school to plan our curriculum for the club, my copy editors and I decided to meet over several weekends to get organized. This curriculum covered AP Style, interviewing, story structure, and photos, while including activities where students can practice journalistic writing. At the same time, we scheduled dates for our meetings, alternating between two days one week and one day the next week.
When our club was approved by the school, one of our copy editors went and made two posters to help advertise our first meeting, which we promptly hung in the halls. To help spread the word, we also created a social media account to post our meeting schedule. The account will also serve as a place for us to post overviews of each meeting in case someone wasn't able to attend.
We hung these posters around the school to help advertise our first meeting.
On the plane home from the JEA/NSPA National Convention in Nashville, I passed this notebook around to my leadership team to see who would be interested in participating in the club.
This document is where we outlined our curriculum for the club.
This is our newly made Instagram page for the club, where we'll post meeting dates and what we've covered in past meetings.
Two student responses from the survey.
Since we are a self-funded program, fundraisers are extremely important in keeping our website up and running. So, consistently posting about these events helps more people show up and support.
Social Media Presence
Our business manager is responsible for scheduling fundraisers to help bring in money for the cost to keep our website up and running. While scheduling fundraisers is important, without promotion through social media, we wouldn't make any money. So, each time we have an event scheduled, it's our social media manager's job to post about it online.
As soon as we know we have a fundraiser planned, we'll post about it on social media multiple times to make sure it reaches a vast amount of people. During the week of the fundraiser, we post about it each day. Other staffers and I will take the time to repost the original on our personal accounts to help our advertisement reach a broader audience.
Even with the promotion we do, our publication still struggles with attendance at fundraising events. So, we have been taking the time to get our name out within our community, which I talk more about in this section.
Each time we release a new quarterly magazine, we're sure to post about it on Instagram. The same week we send our magazine off to the printer, we'll post about the upcoming issue to get people excited about its release. Once our newsstand is stocked, we'll make a second post encouraging people to support our publication by picking up our latest copy.
In the past, there has been much of confusion around whether the magazines are free or not, so, we've made sure to address through social media that there is no cost.
While it's important that we promote our own fundraisers, we also see the importance of supporting other classes and clubs with their advertisements. Starting this school year, we have reposted two stories on our social media account to help both Black Student Union and the 2026 ASB raise money for their clubs. We also post are reminders for students, specifically the senior portraits deadline for yearbook.
Since our newsstand has an old sign that says magazines are 50 cents, there used to be a lot of confusion about if our magazines cost money or not. Each quarter, we produce a new issue of our magazine, distributing them in our orange newsstand at school, public library, local rotary, and any field trips we go on.
If there is another club or class hosting a fundraiser, we like to repost their story to help them out.
Finding Advertisers and Sponsors
Believe it or not, printing 250 copies of a magazine each quarter gets expensive, especially when we are a self-funded publication. However, that's why our advertisement and sponsorship contracts exist. Throughout the school year, our team gets together and travels to different places in our community in search for business that want to support student journalism.
Going in pairs, we explain to business owners who we are and what we do before going into detail about our magazine. Once we're done with our pitch, we give them one of our print magazines along with both an advertisement and sponsorship contract. If they are interested, they'll fill out and mail the form back to us, which then goes directly for the cost to print.
Both our advertisement (left) and sponsorship (right) contracts that we hand out to businesses.
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Orientation & Maze Day
Whenever there is a chance for us to set up a booth and promote our class, we take it. In late August, our school hosts Maze Day, where students come to get their pictures taken and explore different clubs CKHS has to offer. Then later in the year there's orientation, where incoming freshmen explore the school and different booths set up in the cafeteria.
At our stand, we bring each of our magazine issues, merch, candy, awards, and computers for students to look at our website. With mainly leadership running the booth, we explain to students what we do and its importance at CKHS and in the community, while touching on the fun stuff we do, like field trips and award ceremonies. Our job at these events is to inform, answer any questions that students may have and hopefully get new members on our team.
Towards the end of my junior year, our publication decided to set up a booth for the freshman orientation day to inform incoming students about the work we do.
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Last year, our leadership staff went and talked to members of the rotary club after they donated $2,000 for our print magazine.
My sophomore year, staffers in our publication took the time to give class. In late February of this year, me and other staffers will be doing this again.
Local & Class Presentations
Part of what we do each year is presentations for both recruitment and awareness. The Silverdale Rotary Club has been a big contributor to our magazine issues each year, so, to tell them more about what we do while thanking them for their help, we attend one of their meetings and speak. As part of our recruitment measures, we also give presentations to classes around the time of registration to hopefully reach interested students who will join our staff.
This year, leadership staffers and I will be going to feeder schools in order to get underclassmen to join our publication. My idea is that in two years the Journalism 1 course will be its own class and not combine with production, so staffers are given more time to learn the basics.
Each year we update this recruitment slide show, which gets used for both the middle and high school presentations we do.
This was the lunch sign-up sheet we had in place during my freshman year.
Now starting up the lunch booth again, I created a new sign-up sheet for people to fill out.
This spread was created by our editor-in-chief last year.
Lunch Duty
During my freshman year, our publication would host a booth during lunches to promote The Cougar Chronicle and sell merchandise. However, when our publication lost over 30 members of our staff the next year, this stopped happening. With a larger staff my senior year, I decided that it would be best to start up this advertising again to get students interested in the work our publication does.
During lunches, we will have two staffers manning the booth, one sitting down promoting our publication and the other walking around helping to drive more traffic to the booth. At the table, we will have magazines and candy for students to take, while also showing them our website, awards, and everything else we do.
Paws and Puzzles
Thanks to last year's editor-in-chief, we introduced puzzles to our print magazine. Depending on the space that we have, they can range anywhere from one to four pages long. This new addition to our magazine gives readers an interactive space where they can take a break from reading and play a brain game.
Each set of puzzles is different from the last, with the word search being themed to stories in that issue.
Broadcast Promotion
As of this year, we have been working more closely with the KUGR Broadcast at our school to help bring awareness to our publication. For segments, we have advertised our print magazines and website, with one broadcast staffer doing a feature story on our program. Since the broadcast is watched weekly by the majority of our school, these clips highlighting our publication help bring more attention to the work we do for our school and community.
Checking out site analytics daily is important as it helps keep our publication on the right track.
This is the most read stories in the past week; a section embedded within our site's analytics. Being able to see what stories are the most popular helps us understand what our audience is interested in.
Website Analytics
After being the website assistant editor for a year, I've got a good understanding of our website's analytics. In order to get the audience engagement badge from SNO (which I talk more about in the "web" section of my site), we had to pay close attention to the chart on the left. Encompassed in the chart are multiple aspects that depict the traffic on our website.
For starters, I'm able to see how many people have visited our site, how long they stayed, how many stories they read, etc. When I look at a day with high traffic on our website, I also look to see what type of content is posted, as this can tell me what our audience is interested in. What I've noticed is that the more we consistently post, the more gradually that our audience grows.
Depending on the average time viewers spend reading our articles, I'm able to understand a few valuable things that can help us all collectively grow as writers. For one, low-viewing time can either mean our articles are too long, disengaging, or relatively short. From this information, I can help all staffers pay attention to how much they are writing, whether it's relevant, and if their story sticks to a clear flow that all readers can follow.
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