For use in a WIP, did anybody here work on a high school newspaper? If so, I need to know how often a high school newspaper is published, whether it had paid advertising, and how free a hand the students had in writing content. Could you write about sex, about religion, or about politics? Gossip?
My HS published something every 2 weeks. It might only be 1 side of a legal sheet (8 1/2" X 14") of paper (run off a Mimeograph machine in the office. Remember the smell of the purple ink?) or it might be 2 or more sides of 17" X 24" newsprint run by the local weekly paper. That usually depended on how much advertising we were able to get. The paper was run by the students, but supervised by 3 faculty advisors to make sure it was all clean. If it was on the newsprint, we could include B&W pictures. Another local HS only printed one 4-6 times a school year.
For use in a WIP, did anybody here work on a high school newspaper? If so, I need to know how often a high school newspaper is published, whether it had paid advertising,
This is pretty dependent on school size, funding, how active the staff are, etc.
Mine was essentially a two sided page once a week in the fall (amercian football as the primary driver) and less frequently in the spring/winter. No paid ads, but was funded via students panhandling (bake sales, car washes, etc) and was overseen by one person.
and how free a hand the students had in writing content. Could you write about sex, about religion, or about politics? Gossip?
None at all. In a larger school, they may have had more freedom (but not much), but essentially the press was the instrument of the state in my case (and in most imo)
Sex/Religion/politics would be a pipe dream.
Now, in college those are a BIT more viable. Those generally have some paid adverts, more regular schedules, and more in depth articles including some actual (though very basic) journalism. some discussions of sex/politics/religion might be allowed, but you'd still be on a leash to keep you from going to far and it would be heavily dependent on where you lived
For use in a WIP, did anybody here work on a high school newspaper? If so, I need to know how often a high school newspaper is published, whether it had paid advertising, and how free a hand the students had in writing content. Could you write about sex, about religion, or about politics? Gossip?
Hey yo. Proud high school journalism geek here. The school paper at my high school had a reputation for being above average. We actually had businesses around the school calling in asking for advertising space, so I'm still afraid of people who went through our program thinking it would be that easy to sell ads to a newspaper!
As for what stories they could write, well, they had to be approved by the faculty advisor, and if you wanted to write something that could be considered controversial, he would let you do it. But he would tell you privately that the likelihood of publication was low, yet he'd encourage you to write it and grade it accordingly. The school paper also had a good relationship with a local neighborhood paper, and there were often chances of seeing a well-written story that the school could not publish being published in the neighborhood edition.
I've had it happen a couple of times, and I still have several copies of those neighborhood papers somewhere in a box.
I won a couple of statewide competitions, including one from back then. I spent the night with a friend of mine who had recently been kicked out of his home. He was hustling to finish high school and basically living out on the streets. He was a great guy and went to UTAustin and graduated. He's got his own family and works as a dentist. He's still my family's and my dentist.
A pleasant conversation with my wife came when she wondered why I was so vehemently behind our kids visiting that particular dentist. I showed her the story.
For reference, this was in the mid to late 70s.
Eight pages, I think biweekly. Definitely paid advertising - many of the local businesses bought ads as community support. The faculty advisor, who'd been there for thirty+ years, okayed everything that was printed, so nothing outrageous.
Ours varied from 6 to 12 pages of letter-sized paper, corner-stapled. The frequency varied considerably. Sometimes it was two weeks between issues, sometimes two months. I think it depended mostly on who was on the newspaper committee that year, how many of them there were, and how enthusiastic. When the issues were driven by only one or two very enthusiastic kids, the frequency dropped when they had major projects, essays, tests, or social events competing for their time.
One option that hasn't been mentioned is that some high schools had one or more 'underground newspapers,' with entirely different standards as to what could be published, levels of resources, etc.
My high school had at least two, one from the 'countercultural' community (nominally 'punk'), and one from a somewhat more 'fight the power' perspective. The latter was fairly well known to be sponsored by one of the teachers, and it was at least believed that he facilitated the use of school resources to print it. The teacher in question was, for various reasons, essentially immune to being fired over something as minor as some mimeographing (even if it was to copy a newspaper critical of the principal, school board, etc).
Mid-80s, small, private school (my mother was a teacher there, so calm down, folks) with 150 students in the high school, where we printed (early laser printer... no mimeo smell, sorry...) a single-page, one-sided paper (8-1/2" x 11") every week or so with no advertising.
We were left alone, as far as the "reporting" went, and only a cursory edit/review process. Nothing salacious, nothing about sex, religion, politics, or gossip...
Yep, those were the days of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, and those advice columns rapidly declined after they died, as they spearhead the 'common sense' approach, while everyone who followed was of the 'consider seeing a therapist' variety, so there was NO common sense to be found anywhere during that period.
I didn't, yet I was familiar with their content back in those most-ancient of days. The key is they had an editor—usually the instructor in charge, so what they said, goes. So, absolutely NO sex or religion, but discussing politics wasn't quite so politically challenging back then when we still maintained some freedom of speech. Now there are many issues which will get your books banned (anyone recall the book-burning in the 40s and 50s?).
But, depending on the size of the school, the timing could be anywhere from weekly to monthly, as again, it was an official class project, with set expectations. Hell, I even remember the ancient mimeograph printers, and those were horrendous in terms of quality (hand-cranked) way back when electronics weren't very sophisticated yet.
And yes, they were funded by paid advertising. The labor was free, as it was a class requirement, but the adds were typically from the nearby shops where the students would often visit after school (cafes, local shops, malt shops, local department stores, bookstores, and even model car racetracks).
The year was 1993, it was two years after Soviet Union collapsed and my school moved countries and economic systems while staying in place. The local yearly inflation was 1000% and police would refuse to respond to calls saying their vehicles were out of fuel (and their salaries were often late by 3-5 months). That autumn I took over defunct school newspaper.
I was in 10th grade, and journalism was the last of my interests going into the project. Mostly I was sick of being nobody, wanted to impress the cool kids in-crowd and maybe win a girl. And by the end of the year the newspaper revenues roughly doubled my pocket money allowance. As for social game, I managed to become a power in own right and piss of everyone, the principal the most, but he was drunkard and knew I knew that. But I mostly failed at my initial goals.
Politics? My editorials were diatribes. Sex? I published poetry. Gossip? I had a gal reporting on school events with a pen so sharp and poisoned those articles were always scandals in own right.
Despite all that I had my own shelf in teacher's lounge, for correspondence. I was the official school newspaper, but I refused to take the pitiful school funds allocated for it to retain editorial independence, and didn't use school resources in any way, my editorial office and computers were off premises.
Paid adds? No. Seemingly, there were opportunities, frankly, I don't remember why it was so there was none. It's possible my format precluded it, I mean the NGO's I worked from, but that wouldn't have stopped me if I had considered it worth the hassle. I had paper and print for free* (paid by Soros, in effect, through a half dozen proxies) and sold the copies, and pocketed most of the revenue, paying small rewards to my staff and authors on my sole discretion. That was very probably illegal, and very certainly undocumented. I *did* try to distribute for free at first, but nobody read it, I had to sell it to be taken seriously.
I tried very hard to maintain at least once a month publication, incentivizing by participating in a city wide school newspaper collected journal managed by said NGO's and I distributed copies of that too. That had limited space of up to 3 double sided A4 pages for each participant, and I aimed to fill at least that. Occasionally I had extended local versions and special editions.
The old school newspaper was a wall-zine, they had a sizeable panel in hall they could fill with content, but despite having student staff, faculty curators and funds allocated, they had managed to produce next to exactly nothing in years, and I had no idea any of that even existed before I took it over.
Then, the previous year there was an underground publication irregularity produced by the unofficial drama club (the official drama club was defunct). I was a marginal party in that, but it was mostly ran by that year's seniors. It was done in typewriter and manual cutting and photocopy process. I inherited the remaining staff of that, actually forming my core.
Well, I didn't just come out the woods, I was approached during summer by the curator of said wall-zine and given pointers, and I took the bait and swallowed the hook, sinker, cord and the fishing rod whole. I did approach the school IT cabinet, but found that unworkable. So I went with the NGO directly and the now independent "New Technician's Center" with was ex-Soviet structure, that had originally been funded in Soviet militarily budget but under Education ministry oversight.
Anyhow, they had cobbled together a shared office space populated by a dozen donated Macbooks II with OS in Danish (we eventually reinstalled them to English) used by teams from about a dozen schools, in most part very cool people, some very infrequently, some very regularly. So we worked in actual software, PageMaker and QuarkXPress, but plans to go to typography never really worked out and the printing was done by a handful of industrial sized worn out Xeroxes that required finicky maintenance.
So yes, my editorial independence was indirectly curtailed by the office boss there, and my school curator both, but neither actually required signing off material beforehand, and could claim plausible deniability. I could get away with pretty much anything at least once, at least in local publication, the joint magazine inclusions were at least cursory looked over, but I don't remember of anything ever being rejected. Not even an artwork titled "Universe's Asshole".
(Edit: spot a stupid autocorrect)
I've always noted the same thing concerning self-publishing. If you charge the recommended increments ($0.99), few take it seriously since they see anything sold at a discount as being 'cheap' (a subconscious association).
Yet simply charging even dollar amount (round figures) and charging more per copy, your work generally gets taken more seriously. As a former economist, this is known as the law of supply and demand, as the more something is priced, the more it's valued.
So rather than charging a mere $0.99, I'd typically charge $10 or $15 (for initial releases, while I'd charge $7 to $12 for my older books, plus I'd offer discounts for early releases (to boost my initial release numbers to get higher ratings) as well as offering entire series, also at a substantial discount, which meant money in my pocket, rather than a potential that may never come to fruition (practicality vs theory). As once someone does spend that much, they're also more likely to actually read the entire thing (classic reverse psychology).
Yet simply charging even dollar amount (round figures) and charging more per copy, your work generally gets taken more seriously. As a former economist, this is known as the law of supply and demand, as the more something is priced, the more it's valued.
This isn't quite right. When the price of widgets (such as a book) increases, more widgets will be produced. So when I see books getting a good price, I write more books. However since more books / widgets are now available but at higher prices, demand for the widgets will decrease.
In other words, raising the price will increase supply as other producers hope to take advantage of increased profits, but since there's more product competing at higher prices, demand goes down.
All that said, if increasing the price of your book creates value in the mind of the buyer and more sales, more power to you.
~ JBB
In late Soviet system privilege was defined by availability rather than price that sometimes could be very low (especially against supply/demand expectations) but no material thing was entirely free. By 1994 however, everyone had already learned that a free newspaper is literally nothing but advertisements and we had a couple of those around (it's actually possible the stigma of that was why I didn't carry any at all).
My attempt to distribute for free was a catastrophe, my very limited supply (while copying and paper up to certain amount was free to me (later I had buy part of paper for larger circulation editions myself), operating the machines, sorting and stacking required own labor and time anyhow) was pulled by the wrong people and quite literally thrown on the floor and trampled on. Asking a fee created a useful filter, and while sales required labor, it also forced interaction with the public on me (for the most part I did most of the selling personally, especially early on, later I also delegated that).
Profit was secondary consideration. I still distributed for free what initially was a significant percentage: a certain amount of copies went to school's library and teacher's lounge, principal's office, and other official requests, and my pricing was flexible with personal discounts and free copies 'smuggled' to important people if I felt like that. But since there was a nominal price, those too felt special to the receiver. As a result copies were shared and traded from hands to hands by interested people who actually paid attention to the content, instead of being frivolously destroyed by hooligans without really looking at.