So you want to bring all this new media stuff to your high school newspaper. Where do you even start? First, you gotta get a website.

While working with some students at a high school in Austin, Texas, I was surprised to hear that they were worried about starting a website because they were so attached to the print newspaper. But you guys are young, I was thinking. You grew up with a mouse in your hand. You’re not supposed to love newspapers. But they do, or they wouldn’t be in a high school newspaper classroom. It took a while to convince them that convergence could mean better journalism in addition to the print edition, not instead. As an aside, I’m glad they love newspapers because that means print journalism has a chance. (Conversely, posts like these, where a high school journalist is worried about an entire program disappearing, make me sad. Let’s reinvigorate high school journalism programs so this doesn’t happen.)

Where to start?

Eventually we set to work on building a website. We experimented, and through trial and error came up with a method that worked best. Today’s important and timely webinar by Paly Voice (pictured above) adviser Paul Kandell for the High School Broadcast Journalism Project confirmed what we found.

A free option

The first thing we tried was the free hosting service through ASNE’s My High School Journalism. It was quick, easy and did I mention free?

Here’s an example of what the site looks like. This is a great service that ASNE provides, but ultimately the students and I agreed that to make the publication their own, they needed a more flexible format. The biggest downside to doing a site on myhsj.org  is that you’re limited in design and features. I think of this as a starter site to get students used to posting on the internet and thinking about how they want to design their own site. Apparently a lot of other programs have had the same experience because the first several I clicked on hadn’t been updated in months or even years.

A pricier option

I learned about another site that hosts and designs high school newspaper websites in today’s webinar. I saw the price and was happy we hadn’t been tempted. For a $600 setup fee and $200 a year, schoolnewspapersonline.com will host your newspaper’s website.

This option offers more flexibility by giving a choice of website templates, but the cost is high, and you can set up similar websites through WordPress for a lot less.

A happy medium

Which is what we eventually turned to. WordPress is a publishing platform that’s user-friendly and requires minimum to no knowledge of html coding. But even with WordPress, there are two options, and we tried both.

The first and easiest option is to create a blog on WordPress.com. You choose a theme, or layout, based on the free ones available, and WordPress hosts your site for free.  There’s even an option to buy a domain name so you don’t have “WordPress” in the url. Again, this is a great starter site to get students used to updating a website. But again, we were frustrated with the lack of flexibility in designing the site, and most of the free themes available looked too much like blogs for the students’ tastes.

The students ultimately built the site the same way I created this one, by downloading the WordPress software from WordPress.org, buying a domain name for $10, finding a website hosting company to purchase web space  (for about $60 a year), and downloading a premium WordPress theme for about $70. (I like the news and magazine themes that Woothemes sells, but you can find them easily by googling “WordPress themes.”) Some are cheaper; some are more expensive. WordPress.org goes into detail about how to find a hosting company and buy a domain, so I won’t bore you about it here. The students’ website is still a work in progress, as is mine, but here’s what theirs looked like shortly after creating the site:

So for about $170 start-up costs and less than $100 a year for the domain and hosting service, you get a quality website with multimedia capabilities, no html required.

If you’ve had a good (or bad) experience with creating a high school newspaper website in another way, please take a moment to share what you’ve learned.

Depending on one’s general disposition (or mood on a particular day), studying journalism right now is either an important, exciting endeavor or a big, costly mistake.

The beginning

For me, journalism is all I’ve ever wanted to do. What’s been happening the past couple of years has broken my heart and caused me at my lowest moments to wonder why I didn’t study something practical, like accounting.

After completing the master’s program at the Missouri School of Journalism, I was lucky enough to be included in what turned out to be the last round of hires at a daily metro newspaper.

I’m hired, now what?

It was my dream job. I felt like I was part of something important, even though only a small sector of the public cared about the rural and suburban town issues I wrote about. I felt hopeful that I’d eventually move up the ranks of beats, as reporters always had, and maybe even snag a coveted features writing position. Other journalists at a similar point in their careers when it all hit the fan can relate to what happened next.

Uh-oh

Money for travel and training dried up. Positions went unfilled as people left, mostly for jobs outside newspapers. Beats merged, and reporters who had been at the paper for years had to go back to covering government meetings. Morale plunged. And this was at a relatively stable newspaper without layoffs.

Then there was this newfangled Internet thing. Surprisingly enough, even though I left j-school in 2005, I had been required to take only one credit hour on multimedia journalism. I had no idea what was to come.

Techno-what?

I’m a words person. I love writing and editing and grammar and all of those other topics that make me a fun date. In my other life I was probably a copy editor or English teacher. So imagine my surprise when, during a training for multimedia journalism at The Poynter Institute, I learned that I also liked producing videos, audio slideshows and other multimedia components. And I wasn’t bad at it.

I began to see journalists as storytellers, no matter the medium. I felt hope. Back at the paper, I created a blog, shot and edited videos to go along with print stories and eagerly looked for ways to get more involved with multimedia.

The old print vs. online

But my new priorities as a multimedia storyteller conflicted with my duties as a print reporter. Over time, my interest waned.

I accepted the possibility that change in the industry might not come from established media corporations that are cutting journalists in favor of tech people.

Why can’t we be both? This idea isn’t new, and there are plenty of multimedia journalists out there who are both and will lead us through these times.

Finding a new path

After much soul-searching, I decided I’d do more good for journalism by sharing my passion for the craft and interest in online journalism with the next generation. This change has made me hopeful for journalism again.

Friends in (and out of) the journalism world questioned the ethics of encouraging young people to go into a dying profession, only to get laid off and end up in nursing school to learn something practical.

A hopeful future

After observing enthusiastic high school journalists who care about ethics, want nothing more than to tell stories and know how to communicate through technology better than I ever will, I’m convinced that journalism will survive. I believe j-school students studying media history in 2050 will be writing term papers about how we came out of all this. Chances are, they will be writing about major players who today are still in school and have yet to decide to go into journalism.

To make sure this happens, journalism educators are working hard to keep up as high school newsrooms transition as well. I don’t have all the answers of how this will happen, but by giving students the right tools, listening to their ideas and keeping an open mind, we’ll make this transition successful.

This blog will be a place to compile resources and lessons for journalism teachers and students and to share examples of good work coming out of professional and scholastic journalism.

And I promise to try to stay in the mode of thinking that studying journalism is an exciting pursuit rather than a mistake. But if I begin to question it, I’ll share that, too. Happy storytelling.