Newspaper issue #1

For our major project, me and Pauline have decided to do a school newspaper together. We naturally enlisted the help of enthusiastic students around the school to write various articles and features for the paper, as well as of course actually reading it. I think that it could potentially be very valuable in developing school spirit, entertaining students, and expanding their knowledge about the world around us.  Where else would they be able to read about school life, news and read reviews on the latest books and movies, as written by their fellow friends and classmates? As well as contributing to a shared sense of community and belonging, the paper will also contribute to the further widening of horizons of our students. We plan to make this paper bi-weekly, and facilitate the creation of wonderful content which students will create. What's more, we also plan to raise money for charity from the proceeds of the paper.

After three weeks of thought, planning and late-night editing, the first issue of our newspaper came out on the 11th of November, 2013. We received a grand total of twelve articles, all written by various people in the school community, and put them into a  6 page newspaper which we then distributed to all the students.

We approached all our journalists separately, talking to them about what articles they would be interested in writing, and giving them the maximum artistic freedom we could. However, we drew the line at political commentaries of any sort or blatantly offensive articles. Although both me and Pauline firmly support free speech in general, we felt that a school newspaper was not the appropriate medium for these sorts of articles, especially in an international school with so many different nationalities. Since our main goal with this newspaper is to not only harness the creative literary talent in our community, but to also foster school spirit and unity, printing content which is be unjustly biased against a particular ethnicity or political view would be completely uncalled for and also hugely inappropriate.

Yet giving our journalists free reign resulted in a lot of very, very different articles, in most of which you could see passion. As they picked their topics themselves, they had much more fun with them than they would have, had we assigned them ourselves, so I think it is an approach we could use for other issues too, not only because we can truly utilise all their ideas and talent in the best way, but because they themselves are far more likely to want to continue writing for us, which is very important. A paper, no matter how large it is, is nothing without its journalists.

However, this did result in some minor issues. One of the articles we received was so negative that we honestly were wondering whether we should just cut it out entirely. Out of ethical considerations, I shall not include which article in particular. Naturally we didn’t want to slash it, because the journalist would be disappointed (and because it would mess up my layout). This was a journalist we really wanted to keep on board because he was our oldest and most coherent writer. His article was well-written and his main point was valid, but the undercurrent of this toxic negativity was just killing all enjoyment, or at least for me. So I took the liberty of changing it quite majorly in order to preserve the articles message but just make it a bit more appropriate for a secondary school audience, and left both versions side by side on the shared Google drive, for our supervisor to look at and approve one. He told me later that he had liked my edit, and that decided it.

Something linked to this, was the amount of editing each article had to undergo. Because Pauline was home sick all week, I was basically on my own for this issue, chasing journalists down and reminding them about deadlines, as well as editing articles, and doing the layout. Pauline naturally helped when it came to generating ideas or consulting her on the finer points of editing a particularly troublesome article, and she helped edit a bit as well. But the amount of articles we got with basic grammatical or even spelling mistakes,which we had been hoping wouldn't be a problem because of the freely available spellcheck present literally on every electronic device. Yet these problems were in fact there, and we had to edit some stylistic errors quite harshly. Maybe next time we could show them how to use a word processor to check their spelling?


I had qualms about the ethics of doing this so ruthlessly. I changed everything which I thought sounded incorrect or wrong or even just strange, because I wanted our first issue to be as close to perfect as we could get it. However, isn't this a form of censorship? While this was most pronounced in the article I mentioned above, it happened in almost every article but the creative writing, where I drew the line and edited only the harshest of grammatical mistakes to preserve the integrity of the author’s voice and message. I simply couldn't allow an article which I myself considered to be in need of improvement go into the paper, and although I fully understand the implications this has, such as censorship and even as far as the oppression of free speech, I tried very,very hard to leave the articles’ ideas and tone remain untouched. Nonetheless, as I mentioned previously, I simply couldn't allow sloppy or hastily written work into this project, and I think it’s understandable.

The other big issue was the layout software. Due to our limited resources at this stage, and the uncertain future of the project, I downloaded a free software called scribus, which wasn’t particularly user-friendly or powerful, nor did it have many available tutorials. So the layout wasn’t that impressive either, although I was naive enough to suppose that the people congratulating me on the layout were serious. Until they laughed.
We were also far too trusting in our collection of money. We were told that charging for a school newspaper is unethical, even if the money goes to charity, so we decided that introducing a voluntary donation, with a collection jar in an easily accessible place would raise us at least some money. While it did raise us some money, this money wasn’t just about 300 rubles. This doesn’t even cover our paper costs, and any self-respecting charity would laugh in our face if we came to them with a donation that small.

So we talked to our supervisor, asking for permission to sell, even though that would decrease significantly our customer base. Once more we were met with a  veto, although this time, we did come up with a better system. Instead of giving them out and asking people for donations later, we would ask for donations to be given during the giving out process. This would increase the likelihood of somebody actually giving money, because it’s awkward to refuse a donation when there is somebody literally in front of you looking hopeful.
Another thing which I think we could have done better is the deadline for the articles to be handed in to us. Because we told them that Friday was an acceptable date, we had to work all through the weekend, and completely virtually at that, with very little communication between ourselves, especially with our supervisor. It also meant that we had to photocopy during lesson time, something which I still feel very bad about, and then we disrupted lessons to actually hand the papers out. Next time, we will definitely set the deadline earlier, so that our supervisor can look at every article in detail, and so that we can edit the articles together in school maybe and not be so reliant upon technology.

Although I have mainly focused on areas of improvement, I think that our first issue was a success. The fact that people were actually willing to write, and wrote such a wide variety of articles and creative writing pieces was truly wonderful. We’ve received feedback from teachers and students telling us that they enjoyed the paper, and even though we didn’t raise much money, I enjoyed the process of creating the paper, and look forward to our next issue.