Marketing and Sales
Branding
The most important thing for a news publication is to be trusted by its readers and the Northern Light has a really consistent brand and Image. Every year we have a discussion on how to add our own personality to each four year edition but the core values we uphold from edition to edition remain. Which all lead to our readers knowing that we will tell their story accurately and professionally. Ways to make sure our readers know this, especially our student and faculty, is by doing more projects that involve their stories. Such as a project where we take a group of students from each grade, and some faculty, and do some coverage on them.
Marketing, Sales, and Fundraising
When we are selling our subscriptions to the community our marketing really comes in handy. We want to give some sample articles to show how we handle our coverage in a professional way. To help the newer journalists with their fundraising, and marketing, we try to pair them up with a veteran member and provide a packet with all the information they need. In order to encourage fundraising it helped to make it an assignment and emphasize to the students that their fundraising affects their experience in the class. This years staff fundraising completely funded our print program which was a huge highlight to the begining of the year.
Distribution
Our distribution days are a huge celebration in our class. We hype up the latest edition on social media through posts and on our announcements. During class we go in pairs to hand out a few editions to the teachers that request them and we even have a table set up at lunch where we hand them out to the student body. Even during days without distribution we have tables set up in our schools third floor hallway with all of the editions from the current year.
Social Media
For Social Media I feel we should use it in two ways: To assist in spreading awareness of our articles on our website further, to turn quick and fun coverage. The other things that's important for our social media as a student journalism program and elective is to showcase what the class is like. In hopes of getting more of our students who would be good for the class to sign up.