Editing, Leadership & Team Building
Prior to this year, The Communicator's social media was an afterthought. Generally, people only posted to get publishing points, and most of our content was slapped together at the last minute. Social media is often the first impression we leave on our readers, and at this time last year it didn't hold a candle to our web and print publications. Especially now, when almost all human interaction has to happen virtually, social media is vital, and until recently we were not using it to its full potential.
This summer I became one of The Communicator's social media editors-in-chief, and I am the only senior on the team. This is a new position for The Communicator, and the idea of creating an entire publication almost from scratch was equal parts daunting and exciting. Over the summer I met virtually with the other two editors-in-chief countless times. We started by doing research and taking inspiration from other journalistic social media accounts, both professional and scholastic. We then set a clear, overarching goal for the year: to develop The Communicator's social media into a sustainable, professional publication with informative and accurate content that would bring our school community together. We created a handbook, with social media-specific ethics and information about ourselves and our plans. We discussed workflow, and came up with a system to keep our content consistent and high-quality using a combination of Google Spreadsheets and a platform called Buffer. We built design templates through Adobe Spark. We created constants, and then modified them as the year went on based on feedback from our staff and our analytics. In less than a year, The Communicator's social media has gone from an unorganized extension of our website and magazine to an independent publication, and I am honored and proud to have been able to help lead that transition.
One of the biggest challenges we've faced this year is a simple lack of social media experience among our staff. Although The Communicator has many accomplished journalists, most of us have had very little formal education in writing and reporting for social media specifically. After spending the summer getting comfortable with social media journalism, I worked very closely with some of our staff members during the first few months of the school year to pass on what I had learned and help them adapt the skills they already had to be applicable to social media.
View our content at:
Instagram: @communicatorchs
Twitter: @chscommunicator
Facebook: @chscommunicator
(Click on the image next to each example to view the story/post associated with it)
Constants
After writing our handbook, one of the first things we did was develop our constants. We use constants primarily for Instagram, and we have six, one for every day of the week except Sunday. As the year has progressed, we've altered or switched out those that weren't doing well. Below are examples of each of the ones we're currently using.
Monday: Our Turn
This is our only audio-visual multimedia constant, consisting of an animated graphic with a short caption and several slides with quotes from different Communicator staff members. We modified it from a constant already featured in our print magazine.
The post to the right was written and designed by Henry Connor
Date published: Jan. 18, 2021
Tuesday: Stuck in Our Heads
Stuck in Our Heads features a simple graphic and a long-form caption with quotes drawn from an interview with a CHS student about a song that is meaningful to them.
The post to the right was written and designed by Sam Cao
Date published: Feb. 10, 2021
Wednesday: So How Are You? But Really
The Wednesday constant, which was developed in collaboration with Communicator staff member Vanessa Farkas, is a weekly feature on various CHS students. Staff members interview people about their struggles, silver linings and coping mechanisms during the coronavirus pandemic.
The post to the right was written and designed by Lily Sickman-Garner (me)
Photo courtesy of Nadya Matish
Date published: Feb. 11, 2021
Thursday: Guess Who?
This constant comes in two parts. The first post is a baby photo of a CHS student with a caption prompting people to guess their identity in the comments. The second is a current photo of the same student with a long-form caption. Our goal is to help students feel connected and get to know each other a little better while we're all in online school.
The posts to the right were written by Lily Sickman-Garner (me)
Photos courtesy of Lucy Cassell-Kelley
Date published: Sept. 24, 2020
Friday: Fashion Friday
Fashion Friday is consistently one of our most popular constants. Staff members interview students about an outfit they particularly love or that is meaningful to them in some way, then take photos and video of them in that outfit. Our staff always wears a mask to these shoots and keeps at a COVID-safe distance from their subjects. The photos are used for a two-slide design, which is paired with a long-form caption. The video footage is edited into an IGTV video.
The post to the right was written and designed by Lily Sickman-Garner (me)
Date published: Oct. 2, 2020
Saturday: Communicator Eats
For our Saturday constant, Communicator staff members cook or bake something, take a photo of it, and post it along with a caption containing information about the dish, how it turned out, and if/why the recipe was significant to them.
The post to the right was written and photographed by Lily Sickman-Garner (me)
Date published: Sept. 26, 2020
Tutorials
Because most Communicator staff members had little to no experience using Buffer or designing posts on Adobe Spark, before the school year started we created several tutorial videos and organized them in a Google Folder in an effort to give students a go-to spot for any questions or problems they were having when posting on social media. This has made it much easier for people to get their questions answered quickly, and it means that we don't have to teach every individual student how to use all of our platforms. I used the screen recording function on my computer to film four of these videos, showing students how to log in to Buffer, how to post to Facebook, how to post to Instagram, and how our editing process works.
Buffer Login
Facebook Post
Instagram Post
Editing Process
Design
As we were developing The Communicator's social media last summer, we quickly realized that order to create recognizable, memorable content we needed consistent, high quality design. To ensure this, we started by creating design examples for each of our constants, as well as two Adobe Spark templates: one for the constant Our Turn and another for CHS Announcements. Our Turn is our most complicated constant in terms of design, and having a template available makes it more accessible to less experienced staff members. It also incorporates animations and multiple different fonts, and having staff members use the template guarantees that the post will look the same every week. Our CHS Announcements template is crucial for two reasons. First, it guarantees that our updates will look consistent and makes it easier for our followers to spot them on their feeds and find them in our profile. Second, it means that we can post breaking CHS news within a few minutes of learning about it.
Our Turn Template
Because we post Our Turn every week, our "template" comes in the form of a folder in The Communicator's shared Adobe Spark account. Each week, whichever journalist is covering Our Turn can simply make a copy of one of the previous designs and modify it to fit that week's topic and quotes.
To the right is one of the Our Turn cover and quote pages we use as templates
CHS Announcements
To the right is our CHS Announcements template. We wanted to create a simple and easily recognizable design that could be used to post brief and timely updates on our school and district. The CHS colors are rainbow, which we wanted to incorporate, and we chose white text on a black background because we hoped it would stand out against the normal content that comes up on most people's Instagram feeds.
Reporting & Writing
This is my fifth semester writing for The Communicator. During my time on staff I have been a copy editor (junior year), feature editor (second semester, junior year) and social media editor-in-chief (senior year). Below are the stories that I believe mark my journalistic turning points and showcase who I am as a reporter and a writer best.
(Click on the image next to each example to view the story/post associated with it)
College Apps in Quarantine
As a senior, I applied to colleges this year, as did many of my friends. This already stressful process was made even more chaotic by the lack of in-person support from counselors, teachers and friends. I wrote this article to highlight how much many high school seniors were struggling during this time, and how lost a lot of us felt. This story allowed me to give a voice to the collective frustration of my peers during a very challenging semester.
Date published: Feb. 15, 2021
Artist Profile: Ryan Thomas-Palmer
This is the most recent story I've written for The Communicator's website. For the article, I interviewed artist and CHS sophomore Ryan Thomas-Palmer about her work. I was struck by her passion, and I left the interview feeling inspired. The talent she has been able to cultivate in such a short span of time is incredible. In our interview, when we spoke about her most recent piece, she said "I was just kind of like 'I have to draw this. I can't call myself an artist and not draw this.'" Her feelings mirrored my own: I couldn't call myself a journalist and not write about her and her art.
Photo courtesy of Ryan Thomas-Palmer
Date published: Jan 7, 2020
When I was...
This was one of the first stories I did during the 2020-2021 school year. It's a simple piece, consisting entirely of quotes from seven different students. I interviewed each of them about a different year of their lives and used the best quote from each for a multi-slide Instagram post. This isn't a major, groundbreaking story; it's just high school students talking about their lives. But doing these interviews gave me the chance to connect with people during a time when real human connection is rare. Reading their words helps me remember that things weren't always like this, and it makes me feel a little bit less alone.
Photos courtesy of Mary Margaret Hatch, Felicity Rosa-Davies, Johana Horvath, McKenna Duman, Jocelyn Kincaid-Beal, Ana Morgan and Lacey Cooper
Date published: Nov. 23, 2020
Kids These Days: Teen Life
During the 2019-2020 school year, CHS collaborated with Michigan Radio to create the podcast "Kids These Days." I worked with my fellow student and friend Ruby Taylor on a story about the effects social media can have on teens' mental health for the "Teen Life" episode. Working on this podcast was such an incredible experience. It gave me the opportunity to learn from professionals about a field of journalism I had very little prior experience with. I got to see the entire process, from the early stages of brainstorming to the release of the final episode. So much time and effort went into those few minutes of audio, and I was really proud of our final product.
Date published: July 15, 2020
The Iran Situation: Explained
Last year, after Qasem Soleimani was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike, I teamed up with a few other students to research what had happened and explain it in a brief question answer style article. Part of my role as a journalist is to inform, and this has been especially important and difficult recently. Even before COVID-19 hit, 2020 was a chaotic and confusing year, especially for high school students, who make up a large faction of our readership. Writing this article gave me the opportunity to provide a little bit of clarity during a very turbulent time.
Date published: Jan 5, 2020
Fast Fashion: More Than a Retail Price
This was the first in-depth article I wrote for The Communicator. I spent almost a month researching and conducting interviews, and before publishing it I read it over and over and over again, wanting it to be perfect. I have come a long way since writing this story. I'm much faster and better at interviewing, writing, and editing than I was then. But this article was my first, and I remember so clearly opening the print edition and feeling proud to see my words on the page. Publishing this story motivated me to write more; it sparked my passion for journalism and showed me what I was capable of. My portfolio would be incomplete with out it.
Graphic by Sophie Fetter
Date published: June 7, 2019
