audience engagement and marketing.
We’ve always utilized social media to market the Pathfinder and this year is no exception. At the top of our website, we have links to all of our social media pages, which include Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. These buttons allow easy access to our social media pages to our readers.
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Elon Musk’s takeover of X created a wave of dissension both online and off the platform. In the beginning of the year, the EICs decided to entirely take away the Pathfinder’s X/Twitter presence, not only because of its controversial nature (and I always find it completely wise to admit when a controversy is too big for our hands, especially with some of the more troubling data that trends with Twitter), but because we wanted to focus on the platforms that were getting the most engagement. With the removal of X, we pumped up our content on our other social media platforms.
The Parkway West Publications’ Instagram and Facebook are composed of both the Pathfinder and Parkway West's yearbook, Paweshi.
Currently, we have around 2,000 followers on Instagram and 1,800 followers on Facebook. Though we typically receive the most interaction on Instagram, it's important to utilize all of our various social media platforms to extend our reach.
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When we’re not using the Jetpack Social add-on to automatically publish our stories to Facebook, our fabulous Social Media Manager does a great job of daily content. Our content on Facebook and Instagram involves Humans of West, Photo of the Week, and little videos that serve as peeks into our school community. We also post about any general journalism announcements, like the Paweshi yearbook being available as well as awards our staff receives.
Though some of the money that we receive for the Pathfinder comes from department funding, and any SNO donations automatically given on the Pathfinder’s website go toward funding the site, one of the biggest ways that the journalism program earns money is through our yearbook sales and senior advertisements. On average, we make around $60,000 from yearbook sales, so it's important to continue to sell them. Beginning in the first month of school, both sides of the journalism program actively advertise and promote the production of the yearbook through both social media and at school.
Throughout the year, the members of the journalism program will contact people who have not yet bought their yearbook in hopes of selling more. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a part of yearbook or newspaper: we all chip in because we’re all members of the Convergence Journalism program. Advertising is a huge part of receiving our funding, and we often advertise in our monthly Longhorn newsletter that goes out to the entire school, as well as with flyers with QR codes around the school.
To showcase the talent from both our yearbook and newspaper programs, we decided to utilize the Pathfinder's Photo of the Week images on our social media platforms this year. Not only does this encourage our audience to go to our website to view the full quotes and pictures, it is yet another way to link the yearbook and newspaper programs together.
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As for the Pathfinder specifically, we also utilize our platforms to reach out to our general school population; polls are a great way to gain knowledge about our general school population, whether that’s for if they’d like to see a certain section or asking around for sources. Being EIC means keeping track of the Social Media Coordinator and being aware of all the content we post on our social media platforms.
One mistake that I acknowledge we made at the beginning of the year was being incredibly lenient with our staff writers on the topic of marketing. Diverging from previous years, where marketing had to be submitted to receive a grade, initially, we didn’t require marketing from our writers. This change was small but impacted our view count.
However, you live and you learn, and now that we understand the impact of marketing on our view count, the problem is mitigated. Generally, we encourage our writers to market to their family and friends, as well as the people they interviewed for their story and their families, though they are always welcome to market more than that. We have both a Newsletter Editor and a Data Analyst to monitor our website traffic and identify trends and patterns that may signify a needed/necessary change in how we market and figuring out what our audience is attracted to.
We also monitor our social media to keep track of both positive and negative trends, as well as keeping an eye on the content our users prefer to see.
Last year, we implemented a newsletter to create a loyal band of readers and supply them with lots of Pathfinder content. Subscribers to our newsletter have access to the summary of the Pathfinder's posted stories in the previous week. This year, we redesigned the newsletter logo to better reflect the re-design to our site.
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The week before the 2023 Parkway Board of Education elections, I decided to lead a group of three in interviewing all six of the candidates. Some were incumbents, most were first-time candidates, some were backed by the National Education Association, some were backed by Moms for Liberty, some were facing local scandals — all in all, a motley, diverse group of candidates. In order to keep accusations of bias at bay, we decided to present interviews almost exactly as given, only editing for clarity and reading quality (i.e.: removing “um”s and “like”s and other filler words, just like in a regular quote) as well as asking each candidate the same questions on the spot, so that no candidate had time to prepare their answers. This story brought a huge spike of views during the day before the election and was shared on several sites across the area, meaning that we were informing many, many people and giving people in our community a chance to both engage with student media and learn more about their candidates.
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In addition, we utilize several SNO widgets to attract visitors to other parts of our site. We’ve continued to use the ‘Trending Stories’ widget to recommend popular stories to visitors, though we shortened the amount of stories from 10 to six this year with the redesign of our website.
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The Pathfinder utilizes the Weekly Poll feature to keep our audience engaged with the site, even when they’re not necessarily reading a story.
We also have redesigned our templates to include story recommendations near the bottom of the story.
For audience engagement, we enable comments on every piece of media that we produce so that we can receive feedback in all forms. Barring spam and flat-out obscene comments, I approve every single comment, even if they aren’t necessarily positive, to give our audience an option to engage with our media.
In addition, we encourage our audience to reach out via our ‘Contact Us’ page. The teachers and staff can reach out to us about story ideas via our email or the ‘Contact Us’ page as well.
To engage with our audience through stories, there are several times where we include quizzes and interactive elements throughout an article, where the audience can click and be a part of a story.
Audience engagement is the backbone of our newspaper — without it, we’d have no one to read our stories and no one to make an impact on as an audience.