WSSPAPER.COM
SNO’s distinguished site award provides good guidelines to improve our content. WSS has been a distinguished site for the past nine years and it is a goal we aim for each year. So far this year, we’ve received four out of the six badges. They are as follows:​
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Best of SNO: encourages quality writing, multimedia usage, in-depth reporting, and getting multiple interviews. It is usually the first badge we get.
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Audience Engagement: Requires posting on a social media account with over 500 followers for 20 consecutive weekdays. This badge is always a lot of work. Especially for the social media editor. It requires a lot of coordination and communication, but it helps us get better and engage more with the student body. In the month that we did the badge, we gained 66 followers.
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Multimedia: At WSS, we highly encourage our staff to include a variety of multimedia. This badge encompasses photos, videos, and podcasts. All work we submit must meet a set of journalistic guidelines that give us a standard to hold our multimedia to.
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Story Page Excellence: Encourages using a variety of different SNO templates, which helps us create variety.
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Coverage: This badge has three components: Quick coverage, sustained coverage, and continuous coverage. Quick coverage focuses on publishing quality timely news. To get the sustained coverage portion, we ensure that something is published every week in four sections. We usually don’t have to think much about this part because when I schedule stories, they are distributed throughout the cycle. The final portion is the continuous coverage aspect, which I have found the hardest. To meet the requirements, there has to be three stories published with two interviews each about one developing event. This can be difficult because it requires being intentional about the way we cover developing events and ensuring reporters interview two sources.
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Site Excellence: This badge was very helpful when we did our website redesign because it laid out guidelines that SNO expected our website to meet.
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Gossip Friday
Every Friday, the news and sports editors will run what we call a “Gossip Friday” at the start of class. Before class, they compile a list of events going on during the next week that we should cover so they can be assigned to staff. During Gossip Friday, the corresponding editor will run through news or sports events on the list and ask the class who is willing to cover them. We ensure the most newsworthy events are assigned.
Social media
@wsspaper
WSS posts regularly on two Instagram accounts, our main, @wsspaper, and our athletics account, @wssathletics. We are also active on X, Facebook, Tiktok, and YouTube. The examples below are divided into two categories: promotion and reporting. A large amount of our promotion is done on X and Facebook, and most of our social media reporting is done on Instagram.
